Literacy: Degradation versus Enlightenment

My eyes scanned the few paragraphs before me. Yes I was reading, but could I understand or make sense of the words, sentences, and pages? The little black font describing the living conditions of Chimpanzees seemed to jut off the paper in a blur. Then came the questions. All of the minor details and statistics I had previously read and forgotten within seconds was brought up again. I could not remember so I skimmed the paragraphs again in search for a key word—anything that might lead me to the answer. By the time I had answered the questions, my time was nearly up. I still had another passage to read probably about volcanoes or something uninteresting to my ten-year-old brain. 

This is how it was. Every year we had to take standardized tests. Every year I finished them feeling incompetent. Slow. Dumb. As soon as the timer started, my hands would shake and the anxiety would rise. The ACT was no different. As a junior in High School, I sat down to the reading portion of the exam with the same anxiety that I had felt as a child. I left the exam with the same degrading feeling that I had felt as a child. I was more afraid than anything that I would fail college and disappoint my parents. I would never be as smart as my brothers were.

I love to read. I have as long as I’ve known how to read. There has never been an age in which I did not enjoy reading. My scores on tests never could reveal such a fact though. I remember the countless nights of reading. My little sister learned how to sleep to the glow of the lamp beside my bed. Every Friday afternoon, my mom would take me and my brothers and sisters to the library. I could spend hours there. I would get lost in the children’s section looking for picture books about cooking, fairy tales, and dancing, and I would return home with arms full of books. As I grew older, I ventured to the shelves full of novels. I found that the words on the pages became an escape for me. I could see the characters in my mind interacting and the stories unfolding. My family would be downstairs watching television while I was upstairs reading.

Reading inspired me to write. I remember sitting down to make an attempt at writing my own version of a “novel.” I found that reading was much easier than creating my own book to put down on paper. The process of writing was creative, fun, and exasperating to me, but at the same time I knew that I wanted to keep going. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be the best. As a child, people would ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would promptly reply, “An author.” I filled the pages of journals with my own version of Little House on the Prairie, trying to re-create the story that had impacted my childhood and inspired my love of both reading and writing.

Spelling was a completely different story though. I remember the countless hours sitting with my mother having her quiz me. The lists of spelling words seemed unending to me, and I hated every moment of practicing them. I just was never good at spelling. I knew what I wanted to say, but the rules of what to do and what not to do became a jumbled mass in my brain. Learning to spell became like math or science to me—facts that can never be changed or moved. Years passed by before I realized that of course the way to spell a word is a fact, but words you choose are never a fact.

Writing for pleasure soon dissolved by the time I entered High School and my first years of college. I had to learn the exact format of every type of essay and the ways in which to sound professional while at the same time classes required me to submit essays about every topic under the sun. Although I have never enjoyed writing essays for classes, I soon was able to make writing professionally a skill. My college freshman English professor even made my essay submission as the class example paper for future classes. I was able to crank out papers simply because I had to. The love that I once had deep down for writing, was shut down. By the time I had read all of my required textbooks, there was no longer time for reading novels.

Reflection

I remember so vividly the hours spent frustrated beyond belief, trying to make myself somehow be better at speed reading and spelling. I felt like people thought I was stupid, and maybe I was. All I know now is that I love to write. Later years of college opened up a gateway for me to begin pleasure writing again. Much like my childhood, I kept a daily journal in which to write everything—my thoughts, feelings, people, my life. I began to use writing as a way to pour out thoughts that had never been spoken to life or developed. I began to read other people’s writing from a different perspective and found the beauty deep within and the emotions laced within the words on pages. I realized that reading works that have been well written will make you feel. They will make you think.

As a future educator, I want to give my students the opportunity to understand that writing can be enjoyable. Writing is not math or science. Writing is writing. We try to fit writing into a little box of do’s and don’ts. We write papers like math equations—one step at a time and if one step is skipped or missed, the end result is completely wrong. Wrong according to who though? There is a gateway to every student, a way in which to reach him or her and teach concepts. The same applies with reading and writing. I aim to provide my students with diverse reading and writing experiences in order to show that such subjects are flexible as well as fun under the right circumstances.

The curriculum I used in school growing up required me to read countless novels throughout the school year which exposed me to not only many authors, but many styles of writing. The books were carefully selected so as to not only be enjoyable, but provide an educational atmosphere. As a future educator, I want all of my students to understand that reading is never something to hate. I plan to provide my students with the opportunity to find literature that they can truly enjoy, respect, learn from, and carry with them into adulthood as I have. Books provide an exposure to culture, traditions, and diversity. Reading should not be a degrading experience. Reading should be enlightening.