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f1Zenya Smith _
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~ I Professor Jan Rieman

'T' ~;. , Feb 1, 2011
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My Love for Reading Turned Quickly to Distaste

I stood on a blue stool and reached my tiny arms upwards, I rocked back and forth on my

light-up shoes until I had it. I clutched it to my chest as I regained my balance and scrambled
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" i' down from my perch. "Satisfied?" inquired my mother. I shook my head and heard the clicking
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of my hair beads as they knocked against each other, almost as if they were answering with me.

We walked up to the large, brown, counter and I watched as the librarian simultaneously rang the

books through check-out and smiled down at me from behind her glasses. I handed my new

library card up to my mother and grinned.

Ever since I was a small child, I was privileged enough to receive a bed time story from _.
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my large book of fairy tales every night. My mother or grandfather, when he was in the U.S., ~ he \IjA0":\
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would cuddle up beside me and take me through the land of ferocious dragons and princesses in -I hI:: \.of

desperate need of rescue. On weekends, when I wasn't outside playing or in day care, I would

flip through the pages of one of my books and look at the pictures. My mother, who highly

encouraged reading, would sometimes show me familiar words from a story and urge me to read

them to her, pretending I was the best story teller in the world.

As I grew towards elementary school age, I had already collected over two dozen story

books. I had received many of them as Christmas presents from my grandparents who still lived

in Bermuda, from my parents, and from friends of the family who thought I was a genius

because I wore glasses and could speak exceptionally well for a young child.

My elementary school played a large part in expanding my "reading horizons". I had

been enrolled in a Spanish Immersion magnet school which meant that half of the school
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received standard instruction in English, and the other half had all of their classes were taught in

Spanish until the second grade when they went to a daily English class. My father and mother

thought it best that I be enrolled in the Spanish program. I can remember in the first day of

classes my teacher Senorita Palomo rounded us all up and we took a trip to the library just before

lunch.4he library looked gigantic through my tiny eyes and I marveled at all of the books that
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~:------ lined the shelves)My class was taken to a section of the library that had chairs and posters of
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small children in sneakers reading books with pictures of houses, and witches on bikes flying out

from every direction. We sat down in the infant chairs and listened to our new librarian explain

where the Spanish books were, where the fiction and nonfiction books were, and that if we ever

needed help finding anything we should just ask a grownup.

From that day on, I began learning to write, speak, and read Spanish. As I became more

comfortable with the language I began to check out children's books written in Spanish from the

school library. I would take them home and breeze through stories similar to the ones I heard at

bedtime, only in Spanish. "How will she learn English?" I heard one of my mother's friends,
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"\'.) who had overheard a conversation between my father and our neighbor, ask one day on church.

"She'll be fine" responded my father indignantly which shut the nosey woman up right away.

. J, And not surprisingly, my father was exactly right. My exposure to English reading at home

improved my English skills and my exposure to a completely Spanish speaking environment at

school definitely strengthened my Spanish skills.

Not only did my elementary school promote diversity of languages and cultures, but

promoted reading in ways you can't believe. The entire school participated in a computer
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program called Accelerated Reader, or as we liked to call it, A.R. The way the program worked

was, students went to the library and checked out books, read them, logged on to the computer at

school, and took a test. The book, based on difficulty level, would be worth a certain amount of

points, and depending on how many questions were answered correctly, the student would

receive a certain amount of the points the book was worth. Every month the principal would

come around the entire school with a cart and whoever had a certain amount of A.R. points at the

time would get to choose a prize. The grand prizes at the end of the year were slightly larger. If

you had accumulated 100 points by the end of the year, you were taken to lunch at ~lden "rral.

I can remember being loaded on the Activity Bus many years with many other students and

friends and eating lunch at the large buffet. Two hundred points merited an ice skating trip and
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so on.. never received over 200 so I cannot remember the rest of the prizes~·' ,'J.,
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Another incentive at my school was the A.R. wall directly in front of the library. It was a

large cork board split into columns, each with a different point number. Throughout the year, as

students gained more and more points, their names would be placed in each column. I always

loved going through the long list of names and looking for mine whenever I knew I had reached

a certain level. Through this program, I developed more of a love for reading than ever before. I

liked reading books with complicated vocabulary just to say I had been able to finish it. If I

really liked a book, I could finish it in two days, maybe one and a half. Teachers always

complained that students were reading during class and not paying attention to what they were

saying, it was a system working against itself, and this humored me.
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Despite all the teacher complaints, I graduated the fifth grade competent and ready for

middle school. Middle school was a shock; no one encouraged us to read, and we spent most of
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our time learning grammar and preparing for the EOC's. I still went to the school library and

checked out books but as my assignment load increased, the time for leisure reading decreased. I

was made to read passages from books that were of little to no interest to me and consequently I

got to the point where I hardly read at all. My love for reading had turned quickly to distaste.

High school was a continuum of this pattern as I was enrolled in some of the most

rigorous International Baccalaureate and AP classes. The English classes had us read at least six

books a year and write essays picking them apart, comparing them, and proving theories found in

them. In addition to this, we had to read at least 600 pages of books of our choosing per

semester. The thought of having to write an essay at the end of my readings were daunting, and

trying to keep up with everything was stressful; It ruined the whole reading experience. I

sometimes didn't meet reading deadlines and my teacher questioned my ability to excel in this

kind of course. My senior year in high school I dropped the tough courses and took standard

ones. I have to admit, I missed all the readings and I missed my eyes being opened to literature

from different cultures. The classes weren't challenging and we had one assigned reading all

year. It was a joke.

lowe much of the regaining of my love for reading to the slightly less challenging

English course taken my final year of high school. I had more free time to read, and I found

myself purchasing books myself, which is something I never did. I would read the books with

more of an open mind having been exposed to writing from all ends of the spectrum. I carry my
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love for reading with me to this day even though I often find myself falling back into the

sluggish pattern of missing reading due dates and not having enough time to read for fun. None

the less, reading is something that remains dear to me, and this feeling has come from everything

that I have experienced in life.