My Personal Thoughts on Literacy

Reading always has, and probably always will be a huge part of my life! I love the smell and feel of a new, familiar or old book in my hand – I think books are glorious! Despite my love for reading, I do not, however, like reading things on my computer nor will I every purchase some sort of eReader – I feel like they are unnatural and I would rather give my patronage to printed pages.  While I can struggle to read all of college’s assigned class readings, I have found the chance to read over thirty books in my past four semesters while still taking eighteen credits.  I mainly love fiction – of all kinds.  My one weakness is probably World War II stories – I eat that junk up like cake!  That passion started in middle school with a semester studying the Holocaust, but my passion for reading started much earlier. 

My parents always read to me before bed and I hung out with my older cousin and several other older friends who could already read so that really pushed me.  I remember my dad would read me Peter Pan every night until he got sick of it and then he would just make up his only little adventures that Peter would go on – to this day my dad and I still go and see all the Peter Pan related movies.  I learned to read before kindergarten – I don’t remember exactly when or how, but I know I got in trouble in my first week of school for laughing at some boy who couldn’t because I thought it was normal to be reading. As I have grown up, I have noticed that being literate (in the sense of being able to read and write) is not always a trait people have.  I remember when I had a friend who would never read out loud in our fourth grade classroom because he couldn’t make sense of the characters on the page.  Especially in this education program, we are exposed to students with all sorts of difficulties reading so that we will know how to properly handle and instruct those students. 

I think my only un-fond memories about reading are (1) those stupid little three-page paper books that fit perfectly into the box – I could never get them to go back in the box in the right order without bending one. And (2) when I had read all of the books in the children’s section of the library, but my mom did not feel like I was mature enough to go into the adult section. Now that I am finally able to go into whatever section of the library I see fit, I tend to steer clear of the nonfiction unless I am researching something for school.  School does drive most of my thoughts on “literacy” these days, being on track to become an English teacher this should be expected.  I have agreed with what I have learned in my education classes, but I feel like some of my other professors might have skipped these classes because their view does not appear very broad.

All in all, I feel like literacy is something that every single person comes in contact with every single day and I cannot wait until the day that I get to teach and mold middle school brains to love reading half as much as I do!