Me? An Avid Reader?
A math geek’s transformation
By writing on Medium, we are likely people who like to write, and hopefully, read. At the college where I work, people assume that because I teach English, I’ve always been a reader and a writer. People also think that reading and writing come easy.
For example, when I was working on my dissertation for a doctorate in Education, a now-retired administrator told me:
“Well, the doctorate will be easy for you because you’ve always loved to read and write.”
I could have picked apart all the fallacies in that statement when he said it, but instead, I just subtly reminded him that I wasn’t always a reader, nor a writer.
So, what did I like instead?
In fact, as I have written in some other articles, English was not my first language. Nevertheless, that isn’t why I didn’t like reading and writing. I didn’t like to read and write in Spanish either.
It just wasn’t “my thing,” as many of my own students like to say to me when they don’t read what I assign (and then wonder why their grades aren’t what they’d like them to be).
But it was true. I was a math and science geek. There, I admitted it, but how can I not? I am sitting here typing on my laptop while staring at my old…
