Throughout the majority of my public school education I did not like reading. I learned to read without any major difficulties but as I got older and books started getting longer and more difficult to comprehend I struggled and I quickly lost interest. ADHD made it extremely difficult for me to focus and when I read I would lose my place and start reading in a completely new spot, sometimes on the next page, and finish reading only to realize I had no idea what was going on. I particularly remember being assigned The Pearl by John Steinbeck in sixth grade language arts class; I read the first two chapters and unsuccessfully attempted to answer the questions we were assigned for homework. After I tried again with the next two chapters and was not any more successful so I became frustrated and just stopped reading. My teacher made me sit at a table by myself in class everyday because I stopped handing in the homework questions. In hindsight I shouldn't have given up, but at the time I was frustrated and I had no idea what was going on in the book no matter how carefully I tried to read it. Despite my many initial frustrations with reading I eventually learned to love it. Using strategies that I've taught myself along the way I became better at reading and found books that I liked. The first book I ever really loved was Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick, which I read in eight grade. In high school I found that I loved reading autobiographies, especially about athletes and musicians.
I learned to write a lot more easily than I learned to read. I have also always liked writing. Initially I think I liked writing because I didn't like talking and it was a lot easier, and oftentimes more effective, for me to express myself through writing. Writing gave me more time to sort through my thoughts and express them in a way that was coherent to other people. Speaking was frustrating for me when I was younger because I was in speech for all of elementary school and a lot of people couldn't understand what I was trying to say to them and repeating myself eventually got frustrating, especially because it wasn't always that they couldn't understand the words I was saying but more that I couldn't express the thoughts in my head into words. Writing helped me prove to people that I wasn't stupid and that I did have things to say.
Both my failures and my successes in literature have led to my desire to become a teacher. I want to help students learn to love reading and writing and help them learn to use literacy as a source for knowledge, an escape, and a way to learn about and express themselves. I don't want students to become frustrated by their struggles, but instead to accept them, overcome them, and learn from them just like they will with every other struggle they encounter throughout their lives.
Thank you for such a reflective piece. As you move forward as a teacher these reflections will help. You may want to consider never using curriculum as a classroom management tool. Adding, reducing, or removing learning activities is never that effective. Furthermore if it is so important students could skip the event as a punishment is it really that important to teach?
ReplyDeleteI find audiobooks can help students like you who had trouble with fluency and comprehension. Being able to see and hear the words is an easy way to modify the lesson.