Reading is Quite Enjoyable

Looking back, I don’t even think I went to sleep that night. I was so scared and excited but mostly scared about my first day of middle school it kept me up all night. A big new school with new people to meet, I was not ready. What was even more frightening was the thought of middle school English class and the advance reading and writing we would be doing. Now I am one who enjoys learning but there is something about writing essays that I have never been able to master. That morning I went to the school bus stop with my mom and we waited for the bus to come. As it arrived, I had no intention of getting on but with the help and assurance of my mom I did it, I got on.

Arriving in school everyone was so much taller than me and it made things quite scary. As the day passed by, I had the chance to meet some new people, two of which are my current best friends. Finally, came English class which is a subject I was never too great at. My older sister is amazing at everything that has to do with literature but has no ability to do math while for me it’s the complete opposite. In English class my teacher started going over what we will be learning and focusing throughout the year. Then came very bad news, she stated, “we will be reading 3 books throughout this year,” and following that something even worse “and writing an essay discussing the book’s most important ideas.”  This ruined my entire mood for the rest of the day. Reading was something I never took seriously as throughout elementary school the readings were quite easy and at home, I would always find a way to avoid picking up a book. Also writing has been a great difficulty throughout my life. It was something I had struggled as I never was able to put my ideas down on paper in the correct way. Even in elementary school my writing pieces were always my weakest works. My teachers would try to help me in different ways, but it never brought any success. As days passed by, we learned different techniques that would help us find key points of the book while reading. Post it notes were emphasized, as we could jot down our view of an important idea on a certain page. This was something I found much use out of even to this day as it helps me organize my thoughts and gives me the ability to go back to a certain page of a book and see the message the author was displaying.

After all the learning the day finally came, we got our books. I took a glance at the book and its size and a wave of fear came over me. Middle school reading was going to be way too hard and there is no way I can read this book not to mention write an essay is what I said to myself. I read the cover out loud To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. My face had probably completely changed from my joyful look to a much more concerning one as my teacher asked if everything was alright with my copy of the book. The teacher assigned pages to read over the weekend which we would discuss in class and I immediately thought my weekend had been ruined. Came the weekend and in true fashion I had waited last minute to begin reading, but the time came. I picked up the book, opened the cover, went to the first page and began to read. Something very surprising happened, not only was I able to comprehend the words on the pages but I somewhat enjoyed reading those words. It was very odd to me; it had felt as if I was in the book experiencing what Scout Finch the protagonist of the book was experiencing. I was imaging how I would have handled the situations that the character faced, and little did I know I went over the number of pages we were supposed to read. Something about this experience opened a new view for reading to me. The thought that books and other forms or reading might be interesting had begun to cross my mind.

A few weeks had gone by and we were just about finishing the book and once again fear came over me. The teacher began to discuss what we needed to do to write a well-organized essay. The teacher explained we will be taking things slow and first we would be writing a draft that we will continue to revise and work on. This brought some ease to me, but I still had no idea how I was going to write at a middle school level. We began to write a draft and while some had a few sentences written and others a full paragraph, all I had was my name written on the paper. The teacher came over and asked what’s wrong. I had no way to explain that I just didn’t know what to write. For some reason my mind was just blanking. My teacher told me I should just start off by writing the book’s main points in bullets and then go from there. This did help me organize my thoughts. I then started formulating a paragraph and after a little while I had my first paragraph. After a few more classes I had written a draft. What helped me with my writing was a method which was to write out a paragraph, leave my workspace for a little time and then come back and start again. This allowed me to bring fresh ideas and a new view to what I was writing. Came the day where we had to submit our final version of the essay and all I had to say was this was the most I had ever spent writing. What was one of the best feelings came after the papers were graded. I had received my paper and saw that I got a good grade. This was one of the happiest days of my life at that point. For the next two books and essays I had almost no fear and on the contrary was excited to read a new book.

What I dreaded the most turned out to be not so bad. While I’m not going to sit here and say I’m a good writer, nothing close to one, I can say that I am much better than I was writing that first essay. With every time I write I find something I’m better at and something that I need to work on. As for reading it is something that I found a new passion for. Reading allows my mind to flow with ideas and be creative. I learned that reading and writing is not something to fear but I should enjoy. It lets a person express their creativity and allows for me to learn new things about the past, present and future.