Week 7 Essay Option 3, Essay About Reading, Writing, Learning

For this week's essay, I decided to do the third option and write an essay that does not involve my weekly reading.  I did this because I only read half of the unit due to a exam I had Monday.  Specifically, I wanted to touch on the subject of the first memories of reading.

My grandma was a school librarian while she still worked so when I finally came around, she had a vast collection of books and stories for kids.  I used to love it when she would read The Bernstein Bears or any of the fantastic stories by Dr. Seuss.  She put so much emotion and life into her storytelling that my sister and I would be completely enthralled by her tales.  I remember specifically her telling a story called Wiley and the Hairy Man and she would read all of the characters in different voices.  My sister and I would be scared out of our wits when she would tell her that story.

I don't really remember when I learned how to read, but my parents attribute my playing video games to a lot of it.  I guess somewhere along the lines of reading the dialogue in Pokemon and Mario games I picked up reading.  When I took my foreign languages here at OU, I actually set Pokemon to German and played along to help solidify my reading skills.  I could still remember most of the dialogue from the countless hours that I played.

 

Professor Oak.  Web source: Pokemon

A big problem of mine however was I burned myself out of reading for a very long time.  In grade school and early middle school, Accelerated Reading was a big competition.  During those years, I would churn out book after book, reading anything that the library had.  At one point, I had literally read our entire school library and had to read little magazines to keep getting points.  As you could easily imagine, I had little desire to read after that and even now I disdain reading for extended periods of time.  I haven't quit reading; I am just very choosy in my selection and I have to be really drawn to read.