Over the years, my interest and awareness regarding reading and writing have varied from time to time. I remember my mother reading bedtime stories to me as a child and actually painting my personal pictures to what she was saying. Once I was old enough to read the stories myself, I would go back and compare my mental pictures with those that were in the book. During my elementary days, I found the novice level of reading and writing to still be interesting.
Everything from transferring imaginary stories I had thought of onto a sheet of paper to tell the entire class about my church league team winning the basketball championship the previous Saturday, I thoroughly enjoyed writing and felt I had a personal connection to it. There were a stack of old books in the corner of my school library that caught my attention due to bold book cover. I picked the book up and read The Hardy Boys, The Tower Treasure.
It was something about the cover that stuck with me.
Before I even opened the book, the fact that the two boys on the cover seem like they were close to my age gave me some added interest in the book. I became a huge fan of the book series after I read that first book, and was the only books I really read around this time. For some reason, the articles in sports magazine kept my attention more than books that were considered appropriate for my age. Due to my Father’s excessive interest in sports, I was able to grasp on to the vocabulary associated with most sports at a younger age than most people do. I feel my desire and interest in writing grew dim once I reached middle school and had to write about the stories and novels I did not find interesting, causing me not to actively read these books in the first place. That feeling of being distant from the material covered in my middle school classes carried over into high school and it did not help that I had the same strict English teacher for all four years of high school.
Mrs. McCullough was the toughest teacher I have ever had. Not only because she was teaching the subject I found the hardest, but because she made sure she was going to get one hundred percent out of all of her students. I can remember the numerous times I turned in a paper that was simply not the best she thought I could do and she made sure that I knew that. I ended up doing pretty good in these English classes, which goes back to how Mrs. McCullough ran her class. While I may have had a struggle with literary reading and writing for some time, I have had a serious interest in math and truly enjoyed understanding the language associated with it. Math has always been my strongest subject and throughout the years I have been able to understand the terms associated with it.
There were times in my AP Statistics class when some of my fellow classmates and I were trying to solve a problem, and the sentence would not have been comprehended by someone who was not in that class. That has always been a topic where I could fluently speak on whatever issue was a concern. At the high school I attended, every senior is required to write a senior exit paper where they state their stance regarding abortion, with an explanation of their stance. This paper was worth over forty percent of the final grade and was the first serious paper I ever had to type. All papers previous to this one I would be able to sort of breeze through depending on the length and topic of the paper, but this one required some serious work. This paper was for the same English teacher I mentioned earlier, who made this paper an annual piece of work for seniors.
Having graded many papers regarding this topic over the years, she knew what each paper must contain to receive a certain grade. I struggled for weeks and weeks trying to figure out how things were going to work out regarding this paper. Working on that paper my senior helped me make my work more personal. Before that paper, I would just zoom through my papers because most of the time the objective of the paper was straightforward. Having to really put forth the effort to receive a good grade helped me to express what I felt personally on paper more effectively. This process is the main thing that helps me when the constant struggle of composing college papers.
There are times where I know what I want to say, just do not have the proper way of putting on the paper. I feel that struggle in itself speaks excessively about the world of literacy. There are people in this world who are experts in their specific field of work that could show you how things work using their own adaptive terminology compared to if you were to read up on it on your own. Literacy is something that has been around before it was given a name and will always be as long as there is a need for living beings to communicate.