Literacy paper

Kasey Sliva

EDU 352

Literacy Paper

“A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.”

~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

A good book is something that becomes a part of you. It can make you laugh, make you cry, open your mind, and open your heart; it can even make these things happen simultaneously. A good book is something you simply do not want to put down and something that can give you the faintest feeling of disappointment when you realize you have gotten to the last chapter.

From my earliest memories, I have always loved books and always loved reading. Some of my favorite memories are of running to my room at bedtime and trying to pick out a book that my mother would read to me before I went to sleep. I always had so much trouble trying to pick the book she was going to read. Normally, I ended up begging my mother to read more than one to me, because the decision ended up being simply impossible for my four year old mind to endure.

It was not until a couple of years later that reading really became “cool” to me. As soon as my two older sisters began wanting me to read to them, I was hooked. I wanted to read as much as I could and would read pretty much anything that was put in front of me. I was very confident in my reading and kept feeling this level of excitement about it, that is until the first grade.

The one experience that has weakened confidence in reading was my first grade year. The first few weeks of my first grade year each of the students in my class went through some sort of an evaluation process to see what reading group we would be put into. Our teacher had specific names for each of the groups but everyone in the class knew them as something different.

The first group was the “smart group”. This group consisted of all of the students who I thought knew everything and all of the students who were major over-achievers. The second group was the “middle group”. This group consisted of all of the average students, the students who never really did anything special (in a positive or negative way) and could kind of blend in with the crowd. The last group was the “dumb group”. This group consisted of two groups of kids: The kids that never seemed to understand anything and the trouble makers.

When the day came along that the class would be put into our assigned reading groups for the year I was fairly confident in my abilities and was sure I would be put into the “smart group”. The teacher began reading the list as I sat in anticipation, knowing my name would be far down the list as my last name began with the letter “s”. Finally, when she called my name I held my breath and listened. I had been put into the middle group! I was devastated, well as devastated as a first grader can be. At that moment I was bound and determined that I would prove to my teacher and prove to my class that I deserved to be in the “smart group”.

The Book-It program was held in my elementary school and began to be a huge motivating factor for my reading. Looking back, the Book-It program was a brilliant way to bribe children into reading. The guidelines of the Book-It program are simple: A student reads a set number of books and they get voucher for a free personal-pan pizza at Pizza Hut. A person would think a child would see through this sneaky plan to get children to read, but in my case I did not. I loved the book it program and worked hard reading to my mother every night to earn my free pizza.

The Book-It program honestly helped me to become a better reader, more than anything I was learning in school. I began to read less for the purpose of learning to read and more for the purpose of earning my free pizza. I began to love to read and reading became more fun for me.

The second problem I had with my first grade year was phonics. I can not remember one thing I learned from my phonics experience. I knew phonics was supposed to help me learn to read, but I never really understood how it was supposed to help me learn to read. The only thing I do remember is way too many worksheets. That is all I remember and, believe me, it is not a good memory.

Through my third to sixth grade years I began getting into entire sets of books. My obsession began with the Baby-Sitters Club. This was a rather humorous time ending up with an unsuccessful attempt to set up a baby-sitting business of my own. From the Baby-Sitters Club came the Box Car Children and from there came almost every book that had been written at the time by R.L. Stein. Eventually, my mother began getting somewhat upset at the amount of money I (or rather she) was spending on books.

After the time of my obsession with sets of books I began reading almost anything I could find. I started trading books with my grandmother, which can be odd considering she was nearly 80 at the time. I also started to read all of the old books my mother had read as a teenager. As I started to read a wider variety of books I began to appreciate all types of books.

My seventh and eight grade years gave me a few mixed feelings about my reading experience. Reading Shakespeare was not a good experience for me. Firstly, I simply could not understand what was going on. I felt like I was learning an entirely new language and having to apply it in the same day. Secondly, my teachers were slightly old and boring (to put it nicely). Our Shakespeare experience consisted of our teachers putting the tape of the book on and our class sitting there trying to figure out what was going on. We were expected to figure out the story with very trivial help from our teachers. Once in a while, we would be expected to do round-robin reading in class. Round-robin reading was a nightmare for me. I got so incredibly nervous I learned nothing from the book.

My speed bump through the seventh and eight grades did, however, teach me to read what I love and that it is foolish to try to make people read something they do not also love. After seventh and eighth grade my passion for reading did, once again, begin to blossom. I thoroughly enjoyed the books we were assigned to read in my high school English classes. Most of the students in my class spent more of their time complaining about the books we had to read than reading the books. I, on the other hand, would read the entire book before the class got through the first two chapters.

Now, in my final years of college I do not have quite as much time to read for pleasure. Most of my reading includes required reading and text books. The summers, however, are a time of enjoyment. I try to read as much as possible. I was lucky to have a very easy job over the summer and read as many as six books a week. I believe this is what others need to learn to do and what we need to teach children, the love of reading.

“TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book.”

"Well see," said Sasha, "it just happened one day and suddenly it felt like 'Yippee, I CAN READ,'" and he threw up his arms and laughed, "and it made me feel different inside my tummy. I felt kind of powerful."

My own literacy experience has given me a huge insight into how I want to teach my own students. I think one of the main mistakes teachers make is to make reading seem like a chore. If teachers treat reading as a break or as a fun time in class, students will respond the same. Another mistake I believe teachers make is making every child in the class read the same book. If people or children enjoy what they are doing they are going to put a lot more effort into it. If you make every child read the same book, some children will enjoy the book and put hard work into reading it, but there still will be those other children that could care less about the book and not try at all. The last thing I will use in my classroom and recommend the school use is the Book-It program or some program similar to it. Book-It programs give children who would normally never pick up a book a reason to. It will help them learn that all of the worksheets they do really will pay off.