Comfort
If I knew how much I would love reading and writing now, I wouldn’t have done what I did when I was a kid. Throughout elementary school and middle school I hated to read. I was always a slow reader growing up and when I started to notice other kids around me weren’t as slow as me, I started to retreat from the idea of reading. I dreaded the idea of getting called on in class to read out loud because I felt like my classmates were judging me.
I would distract myself to avoid the judgement. During silent reading in class I never read. Instead I would just flip through the pages; so it looked like I was reading when I was really looking around my desk and breaking an eraser apart. At the end of the period I would see how many pages my friends read and mark that on my paper and in my book. That night, I would sit in my comfy bed with all of my blankets and read. I usually read around 30 pages because I thought that would catch me up for the class period and my homework reading. Another strategy I had for getting away with reading in class is that I would chose a book I had already read before. It was an easy “A”. Anything I could do to get out of reading in class, I did.
Eventually I had gone through all of the books I had read previous years and it was time for me to find a new one. After those few months of faking my way through reading, I had found a book that I loved. I came across the book Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. I loved this book and I reread it about 3 times. This book was easy to read, understand, and it was over all very interesting. This was the first book of 6th grade I actually liked. Although I loved this book, I still didn’t like reading it in class. I would still lie about the number of pages I read during class, and I still would have to make up for those pages later on that night. Reading at home I felt comfortable. No students were there to judge me on how slow I was reading, and I didn’t feel like I had to rush.
As a child I was surrounded by books. My Nana and Papa who lived in a big green house with a beautiful garden surrounding it, had a small book store on the bottom floor of their duplex house. The book store was only one medium sized room, and was filled with books. The books were ones my Nana had bought from people, some were donated, and some were even her own. I remember as a child, I would walk around the tall book cases playing hide and seek with my cousins when they would come over. The room smelled of books. Some old and some new. And the old wooden floors would creak as you walked around. And there was always classical music playing in the background. My Nana and Papa had hundreds of books everywhere in the house. There were books on the dining room table, the kitchen table, in the bathroom, by their bed, and anywhere else you would look. They had books about cooking, gardening, children’s books, the for dummies books, and even a sign language book. I was always surrounded by books and I liked them. Why was I letting the uncomforting feeling of the classroom take that away from me? What I didn’t know was, that feeling would eventually go away.
It wasn’t until high school that I started to feel comfortable in the classroom. It was my junior and senior year to be exact; My teacher was Mrs. Bucher for both years. Mrs. Bucher was not very tall and had medium length brown hair. She was always smiling and made the energy of the class room fun and exciting. Both junior and senior year of high school, I was in a small class. The class had only about 12 students in it and it allowed you to become close with the other students and the teacher. On the first day for English of my senior year, Mrs. Bucher had an ice breaker to get to know the other students in class and her. For the ice breaker, we would go around the room and say something we did over the summer and an interesting fact about ourselves. Although I don’t remember what I said about myself, I remember what Mrs. Bucher said. She told us about how she traveled with her family and then she told us about how she could sing opera, and then she proved it to us. She put herself out there and sang in front of all of her students. She was amazing at singing, just like she was at teaching. In that moment, I remember feeling once again comfortable in her class room for yet another year. There was no judgement in the class and I liked that. During class, Mrs. Bucher would always be active. She would walk back and forth from white board to white board making sure we were staying attentive. She got to know my techniques of writing and what I liked to read. Mrs. Bucher got to know her students and made a friendship with them. Our class was able to joke around and talk about things off of the topic of English, but we did always get back on track. I excelled in her class not just by grades, but my love for reading also. She made my knowledge of literacy grow and become who I am right now.
Growing up I learned that being in a classroom I felt very uncomfortable and that causes me to worry about the way other students were looking at me. In elementary school I didn’t like the structure of the classroom and that made me not like reading in class. But as the year of 6th grade went on, and I started to find books I liked and I was reading outside of the classroom, I felt more comfortable. I liked reading at my house in my bed with no one around me. As I began to like reading more, this only progressed in high school. In high school I couldn’t lie my way through papers and reading questions so I was forced to read in the classroom. Thankfully, since I was reading at home my reading speed had increased more and I was much more confident reading in class. I began to feel the comfort I was missing in elementary school.
