...teacher thought nothing of it and just had me work extra hard. The writing problem carried on to the first grade and event made it very difficult for me to read. My first grade teacher didn’t just let the problem go tough she talked to my parents about having me tested for a learning disability. My parents agreed to have me tested for a learn disability and it came back that I didn’t have a learning disability but they told my parents that I rode the fine line of being dyslexic. Since I road such a fine line my first grade teacher to be on the safe side decided to place me into a tittle one reading class. I really think this might have hurt me in the long run because the students that were in this class were so much further behind in read than what I was. This teacher that I had strongly believed in phonics and having her students sounds the words out. She event convened my parents into buying me hooked on Phonics for a Christmas gift. I didn’t find using the hooked on phonics to be that helpful because many of the words that I tried to read and couldn’t figure out were the words that had special rules and didn’t fallow phonics. After my third grade year I switched school and was tested once aging for a learning disability aging the test administrator told my parents as well as my teacher that I had no learning disability but that I was close to being dyslexic. This new school had the same thought as my old school and placed me into their title one reading class. This time...
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...have always pushed me to learn to read and write. Truthfully speaking I don’t think I would have gotten where I am if it wasn’t for my family. In truth, reading and writing are one of the best skills that you can obtain, it is a skill that most of us learn at a young age, and it is also one of the greatest and most helpful tools that will make our lives much easier. I remember the first book I ever read or tried to read was “The Cat in the Hat” and I remember that because that was the first book my uncle ever got for me. My uncle played a big role in my literacy life. It was the first day of elementary when me and my brother who is a year older than me were handed a blank composition book from my uncle. Every day after school my brother and I would have to write a full page of everything that we did from the morning to the end of school and everything we learned. My uncle would come home from work and check our writing and after that was he would make us read for 15 minutes. The reason me and brother would always read very carefully was because at the end of the book we would have to write what the book was about in our own words. I never liked to read but writing on the other hand excited me. I remember in fifth grade when the teacher would make me read in front of the whole class I would hate it. I would prefer to write three pages of anything but not read a page of a book. Knowing I am the kind of person who would choose a movie over a book, I never read for pleasure. As I...
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...colored preschool classroom.I was about four years olds simply happy to be there with my friends . We were just getting our own very first books to read by our teacher, Miss Julie. All of the other students were simply throwing their books and doing Lord knows what with their guided reading books when they got the books handed to them . But if you looked closely, you would see a blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl in the corner of the classroom actually holding her book and attempting to read. I was always trying to be like my older sister growing up, so , if I wanted to be like her that meant that I would have to get smart, really fast . There I was as a tiny preschooler actually attempting...
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...room, on this giant table, is where I read. Read the same book I got as a gift over, and over, and over, until I was able to read it perfectly aloud. My mother always liked to emphasize the well known quote, “practice makes perfect.” What she seemed to not fully understand was that stuttering could not be fixed from one day to another. Every tutoring session broke my hope in taming this beast, because every tutoring session my stuttering got worse, or at least it seemed that way. “You can erase the board today Cindy,” said my first grade teacher Mrs. Gonzalez. As the tall, skinny, tan teacher awkwardly walked back to her wooden desk in her white dress, I slowly stood up from my chair. After jumping over the sea of backpacks lying on the floor and saying the words “excuse me” to three of my peers, I finally reached the front of the small, packed classroom. I caught my breath to eventually say “thank you Mrs. Gonzalez!” with the biggest smile my face could manage. I picked up the big chalk board eraser, and a classmate of mine stood up from her seat. Ever since Kindergarten, Christina was my competition for every test, quiz, and most importantly, becoming “teacher’s pet.” She had short brown hair, a little taller than I was, and always had her white polo ironed and her white sneakers as clean as can be. She never let me live a day without telling me my shoes were dirty or my shirt was wrinkled. Christina believed she was better than me because of her clean uniform. Her mom...
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...An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks is definitely unlike any book I have ever read before. The books that interest me are usually fiction/fantasy or romantic. I like to think of myself as quite skilled in the subject of English and Literature, so I figured I could just grin and bear it and get through this reading easily using my same old strategies. I immediately found out that this was not going to be the case. Sacks is clearly a well-educated and experienced man, and it shows in his writing. A lot of the vocabulary utilized stumped me to the point where it made grasping the gist of the reading difficult. Although I have to admit once I got past the boring introduction of Temple Grandin’s autism, I was quite interested in reading more. I was very interested in reading and learning about autism once I was able to focus. The reading is about Temple Grandin, a high-functioning autistic, who has accomplished a variety of things in her life. I had never heard of her before but after reading this chapter I was very interested in her and autism itself. I happen to know some people that are autistic so this reading definitely allowed me to empathize more with them now that I understood their condition. One specific thing I learned which I thought was interesting was that individuals with autism often experience other disorders. “The genetic form may be associated, in the affected individual or family, with other genetic disorders, such as dyslexia, attention deficit...
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...My literacy journey began when I first began going to school, I joined school and I began attending Pre Kinder. At that time in age, I knew nothing about letters or numbers. I can say I barely knew my name and how old I was. The first day of school began with a simple introduction on learning how to write my name. I can still remember how difficult it was to spell out my name! Man it was hard. I remember walking into class that scary morning and meeting a lady who would change my little world forever. Her name was Mrs. Guevara. She was an angel in my eyes. Mrs. Guevara’s lessons were fun and educational. She taught us many songs, for example the ABC’S she taught us the vowels and how to pronounce them. At first I would get so frustrated for not being able to pronounce them properly, but over time I was able to accomplish that....
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...MALCOLM X Learning to Read Malcolm Little, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, was reborn Malcolm X in his twenties while imprisoned for burglary. (He considered "Little" a slave name and chose the "X" to signify his lost African tribal name.) His conversion to Islam under the Nation of Islam and his rigorous self-education led him to a life ofpolitical activism marked by hatred, violence, and hope. For a time, as the foremost spokesman of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm preached a separatist philosophy with racist rhetoric; on breaking with the Nation of Islam and converting to orthodox Islam after a pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm again changed his name (to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and philosophy, moving closer to the integrationist goals of the mainstream civil rights movement. Not quite a year later, he was assassinated. "Learning to Read" is an excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which was written by Alex Haley from interviews completed shortly before Malcolm's death. While ghostwritten, Malcolm's fierce intelligence and passion are evident; it is easier to miss the sometimes surprising moments of humor, but look for them because they give a fuller sense of the man. It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a homemade education. I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the...
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...September 2015 Stuck In Another Life I’ve entered a time warp; I'm back in my seventh grade English class. I look around and I see old classmates. People I haven’t seen in years. My old best friend is on my left with her buck-toothed smile and a crooked ponytail. The white walls contain nothing but a solitary poster that reads, "Books are gateways to another life" in bright green letters drawn on a cartoon brain. I can never guess what it means. I walk in to that class after lunch every day, sit at my desk, and stare at it for an hour and a half, yet I can never relate to it in any way. My teacher, strict and on the heavy side, was the type of teacher you didn’t want to get on her bad side. If she even had sides. She was giving us a lecture on how to infer poems with the chalk screeching like nails on the board. Our eyes widened with horror while she talked to us like we were foreigners that didn’t understand the concept of the language. “Songs. Are. Poems.” Not only did I hate poems I hated analyzing them as well. Rock was never in my interest so I detested “Fully Alive” when Ms. Brock first played it for us to analyze. It was impossible to even concentrate on the first verse of the song due to the icicle forming on my nose. I guess since she was a heavy-set lady she got warm very easily and insisted on keeping the room temperature in the forties. The song itself was depressing but it only made it worse that I was having a flash back. My uncle was lying on the hospital bed, quiet and...
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...kid, and I couldn’t read or write. I was very interested in reading since I was a child growing up in Iran. I remember that I was grabbing my mom or my dad magazine’s and look through all the pictures and wondering what is it saying? Then I would go to my dad and asking him to tell me what all these word surrounding these pictures means? So my dad was putting his glasses on while he was smiling at me and looked at the page that I was pointing at, then he start to read it to me loud and clear; at that point I was very jealous of my dad, that how can he read so well and I couldn’t ? and he would tell me that:”Don’t worry once you go to school they will teach you and you can read anything you want as good as me or even better”. My father explained to me that he felt books were very important and that I had been exposed to books from the beginning. I was read to by many family members such as aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. He also stressed that I was a very verbal child at a young age and had been around mostly adults for the first few years. My vocabulary started at about five months and by two years had clear structured sentences. As I was learning how to speak, I was also introduced to letters and their sounds. By the time I was four and a half I was able to write and read my name and the alphabet. As I learned how to speak, read, and write I also taught my younger brother. There are two grades during school I remember that made an impact on me. They were kindergarten...
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...the surface. Reading other people’s stories or thoughts inspires me to be free and write down how I feel. Sometimes it’s hard to express the feelings I get and how to incorporate them into words for others to comprehend, but I guess that’s the reason. To have others approach your feelings and figure out the emotions they capture through your piece of literature. Now, the part I dislike about writing is having to follow structure and regulations. I do understand why there are building blocks to literacy writing, I just don’t feel you get to allow yourself to come out of your shell as much. For example, me, I am writing this essay allowing myself to express what I feel and about my writing history, but it’s going by some guidelines of the class. The font, margins, and the minimum length of the essay are just the beginning of them. In high school I remember we had to write about how we felt about a book that was assigned in class, but we had to have a thesis statement, a full-circle ending, and it had to be 3 pages long. I did enjoy reading the book, the analysis behind the words and writing what we got out of the book. It was the structural part of the assignment I didn’t enjoy. I do love to write, seeing my words come out onto paper comes naturally to me, even though I had a hard time at the beginning of my writing when I started grade school. My parents placed me in school at age four, when I started first grade I had trouble understanding the teachers because they spoke...
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...A first memory of when I became interested in reading and writing was when I was about 5 and I read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr.Seuss. I remember just loving to read that book that I read it like 10 times and then my parents got me more Dr.Seuss’s books and I remember reading those books very quickly. I really enjoyed Dr. Seuss’s books because the drawings were so colorful and the rhyming I loved how his books always rhymed or how he created words to make the book rhyme. As I grew older my interested in literature varied widely, but I really enjoy reading vampire love stories. My love for this genre started with the Twilight series by Stephanie Myers and since those books did so well, writes continued to make more vampire love stories. Thus, making...
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...turning point the first time he was wrongfully arrested after failing to explain a deep cut on his arm. He stated: "There I met men, prisoners, who read aloud to each other the works of Neruda, Paz, Sabines, Nemerov, and Hemingway. Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory. Listening to the words of these writers, I felt that invisible threat from without lessen- my sense of teetering on a rotting plank over swamp water where famished alligators clamped their horny snouts for my blood. While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs" (4). The poetry made him feel secure and free even though he was in jail with inmates. The poetry saves him from being eaten by the alligators and in reality it saves him from losing all hope and feeling trapped because he's in jail. Baca was unable to communicate or express himself which landed him in jail twice. Both times he was innocent, but the second time he couldn't pay his bail so he was sent to the county jail. After stealing an attendant's university textbook he began to learn how to read. He commented that "I became so absorbed in how the sounds created music in me and happiness, I forgot where I was...For a while, a deep sadness overcame me, as if I had chanced on a long-lost friend and mourned the years of separation. But soon the heartache of having missed so much of life, that had numbed me since I was a child, gaveaway, as if a grave illness lifted itself from me and I was cured...
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...When I was four to five years old I started receiving books for my birthday, Christmas and every celebration. I read every book I received repeatedly. A friend’s house, a pool party or a road trip – whatever the occasion may be, I always brought a book along to read. Eventually I was gifted a book from a neighbor titled “Alberto the Dancing Alligator” by Richard Waring. I could not put the book down after the first time I read it. That was my first memory of being excited about a book. From the first book I read to the most recent one, reading has affected my life in various ways. As I got older, my English classes started introducing new types of literature and I was being exposed to new things. As time went on and I was being required to...
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...It was a day only several years ago when I first realized the numerous benefits I could realize from reading. Of course, I had been told all my life that reading was important. I was forced to do it in class after class beginning in elementary school and on up through high school. I had never read for enjoyment, had never gone to a book store and surveyed the stacks of tomes with pleasure, had never been to the library except when it was required for researching a particular assignment. To me reading was drudgery, a chore which interfered with more important things in life, like eating and sleeping. It wasn’t until I took an English class in my senior year, however, that the importance of reading finally penetrated my brain. I realized my teacher for that English class, Mrs. Smith, was different from others I’d had in the past from the first day I walked into her classroom. While she looked like a typical, older lady with her graying hair and pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses continually perched on the end of her nose, it was her attitude that set her apart from other instructors. From her roost atop a stool at the front of the room, Mrs. Smith ruled the classroom with short legs swinging to and fro above the rungs while her arms – complete with flabby “schoolteacher arm” – would wave about to lend emphasis to her words. Mrs. Smith could tell I was uncomfortable in her English class almost immediately. She watched me squirm in my seat during her lectures and saw...
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...Sharing the first chapter of Half Girlfriend. Prologue ------------ ‘They are your journals, you read them,’ I said to him. He shook his head. ‘Listen, I don’t have the time or patience for this,’ I said, getting irritated. Being a writer on a book tour doesn’t allow for much sleep—I had not slept more than four hours a night for a week. I checked my watch. ‘It’s midnight. I gave you my view. It’s time for me to sleep now.’ ‘I want you to read them,’ he said. We were in my room at the Chanakya Hotel, Patna. This morning, he had tried to stop me on my way out. Then he had waited for me all day; I had returned late at night to find him sitting in the hotel lobby. ‘Just give me five minutes, sir,’ he had said, following me into the lift. And now here we were in my room as he pulled out three tattered notebooks from his backpack. The spine of the books came apart as he plonked them on the table. The yellowing pages fanned out between us. The pages had handwritten text, mostly illegible, as the ink had smudged. Many pages had holes in them, rats having snacked on them. An aspiring writer, I thought. ‘If this is a manuscript, please submit it to a publisher. However, do not send it in this state,’ I said. ‘I am not a writer. This is not a book.’ ‘It’s not?’ I said, lightly touching a crumbling page. I looked up at him. Even seated, he was tall. Over six feet, he had a sunburnt, outdoor ruggedness about him. Black hair, black eyes and a particularly...
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