I Don’t Read
Brandon Cass
10/10/16
As I walk into American Studies in the middle of my junior year, I start asking some of my friends if they read last nights assigned reading. “Yo did you read last night?” Luckily Lauren did the reading. “Yeah, do you want me to fill you in?” “That would be awesome.” So she filled me in on what happened. Next up was book group. To prepare for group I skimmed over a few paragraphs for what we had to read. I picked one paragraph or sentence that I could talk about. I waited a little bit until all the people who generally participate a lot to share their part. I listened to what they had to say because it would let me get a lot of information for the book quizzes that come up. Then I talked about my paragraph or sentence so I got my participation in book group. I always looked at Mr. Stivers to see if he checked off my name, which he always did. I knew that if I said one thing Mr. Stivers would give me participation credit. He always seemed so relaxed with me. He never really pushed me to do much. None of my english teachers did. I think thats because I would always somehow mange to fall into the middle class so to speak when it came to reading and writing, and getting that average grade with no effort was just fine with me. This was my system for every english class or any class that required me to read something. I had perfected it and still do it to this day, and have not had to do anything different. When people ask me what I like to read I just tell them I don’t read.
I don’t read for pleasure and enjoyment, not even if its about something I like. If I saw an article about a sports player that I liked I would probably look at the picture, read the title and and thats about it. I wouldn’t read the passage at all usually. The most I would do is skim bold words and just read anything that stuck out. I gathered enough information from titles and little phrases that told me everything I wanted to know. I don’t care about every detail in a book try story. The only time I will read is if I absolutely have to.
My anatomy and physiology teacher, Mrs. Hunter, tried to get me to read a book in her class senior year. We had to read a book about the history of small pox and the Anthrax scare. Now in my mind I was already thinking “I’m not going to read this book,” and she knew I didn’t read because I told her that I don’t read. I told her that I’ve never read a book in high school so far. She didn’t like that very much and basically said I was going to read this one. So every time we came to class, when certain pages were supposed to be read, she would ask the class if they read. Everyone would say yes. Then she would ask me specifically if I read. I would just smile and say sure. Now of course I didn’t read but I wasn’t going to tell her that. When the book quizzes would come around I would still do really good on them because they were two questions and it was open book. So even though she pushed me to read I still managed to find a way not to. Not reading these assigned books have never really affected me except in one aspect.
I have never struggled writing a paper to the required length of an assignment, but my papers are not always the neatest. Ideas can be repeated constantly, paragraphs aren’t always organized in how they should be, words are usually misspelled or are the wrong version of that word. Punctuation and grammar are always a problem. Most of these mistakes I don’t know are mistakes. There is a lot I don’t understand about editing papers, proper punctuation and grammar, or organization. I write very basic. Now basic isn’t always a bad thing, but its not always very impressive. A big part of the reason for me writing like this is because I never read books, papers, magazines, or anything for that matter. Not reading these types of writing has hindered my ability to write because I don’t look at these prime examples of proper mechanics and organization. Reading helps teach you to understand how to write and it can give you knowledge to help generate ideas.
Most of my ideas for papers come from listening in class and from my own knowledge and past experiences. This technique isn’t going to help me later on in life. Im going to have to be able to read information about my profession so I can learn how to do it properly and to be successful. I know that that is going to be challenging for me because I don’t like to read, but I think that if I had started trying to get into reading earlier then the processes might be easier.
