Reading: A Love-Hate Relationship

My mom reading with my niece, just like she used to with me :)

             I’ve loved to read nearly as long as I could do it, but I hated it at first.  I remember struggling to read short, easy books that my friends could finish in minutes without even having to sound out words.  I tried and tried, but I just couldn’t read.  Finally one night while I was trying to read with my mom I got so frustrated that I started yelling “I just can’t read, okay?!” Well, you can probably imagine that that didn’t go over very well.  My mom was as frustrated as I was and insisted that not only could I read, but I would read.  She sat down and told me to read.  I read.  It wasn’t easy, but after that night I picked it up quickly and my interest in reading grew.  About two years later (I think) I was diagnosed with exophoria (I'm fairly sure that's what I had), a condition which didn’t allow my eyes to track together on a page.  The eye doctors were amazed that I could read at all, let alone read well above grade level as I was doing at the time.  They put me in eye therapy and my eyes no longer have that problem. 

Way cuter than the original illustration

During the later years of elementary, I read as much as I could.  I used to get books about animals from the library, in addition to reading children’s stories and novels.  I read so much and so well that I didn’t really fit in with my peers at school.  On one occasion when  I was in the fourth grade, we were assigned to read a story at home and then bring it to school the next day so we could read it out loud in circle time.  I brought a collection of stories about dolphins and chose a story about Mona the bottlenose dolphin having her miracle baby in an aquatic park. Everyone else brought cute, colorful children’s books full of illustrations.  Mine only had one picture- of a mother dolphin with her baby’s tail sticking out of her birth canal.  It wasn’t really a hit.  Sometimes I was made fun of by other students because I read so much, but I just kept reading.

            My enjoyment in reading has continued to grow over the years.  I’m not too picky about the genre of the books I read, but if I’m going to read a classic or a historical fiction it had better be a good one.  In fact, some of my least favorite reading were classics that I had to read in high school.  I did not like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, or Great Expectations. There were other assigned classics that I really enjoyed.  I won’t go into specifics of why I disliked each of the books above, but they were not easy for me to get through.  I think part of it was that I didn’t like the characters or the message that I was taking home from the book.  Another thing especially in the last two from the list was that I felt like nothing ever happened.  I think I enjoyed the assigned readings the most from books that had strong, thought provoking messages that resonated with me or very likeable characters.

            I hope I can help students in my class learn to appreciate readings from books about biology or science in general.  I know that I probably won’t change most students into readers as enthusiastic as myself, but I hope to make texts that resonate with their own lives available.  In the classroom, that may be articles or books on medical advances or current controversies.  I also plan on having texts full of just plain cool stuff, including pictures (I learned from that whole Mona thing) for students to look at or check out.  I also know how it is to feel like I just couldn’t read.  It was a long time ago, but I remember it clearly.  It was confusing, frustrating, and embarrassing.  I don’t want to make student’s feel like that in my class.  I know that some students are more confident in reading scientific texts than others and I certainly wouldn’t want to make anyone do something they aren’t ready for so I will avoid using the “popsickle stick” method or calling on students randomly to read.