The North Wayne Library
The small, old town of Wayne, Maine didn’t have much in it, except for the North Wayne Library. Sitting on the old swing that consisted of a prickly old yellow rope with a wooden plank for a seat, I’d read the books I found in my grandmother’s library, the North Wayne Library, that lied just across the lawn. Every time I’d walk into the library I’d be overwhelmed by that musty odor you smell when you open up a really old book. Old shelves made of wood that could have been made centuries ago were filled with books that lined the halls and rooms on the first floor. The library had everything from the most popular children books to sophisticated novels. As a child I was fascinated by dinosaurs and having a library just a couple houses down that was owned by my grandmother gave me an opportunity to pursue those fascinations. Being able to pick out any book I wanted at my own leisure was not only comforting but made me continue to pick out more and more books.
However, in school I didn’t have the same comfort and freewill. In elementary school I had to pick a book off a shelf with only three or four options and read a certain amount of pages every night. As I moved up to fourth and fifth grade we were all handed out a crummy old book and again told how many pages to read each night. Not only was I uninterested in the books we were assigned to read, I didn’t like having to read a certain number of pages each night. What if I wanted to read ahead to find out what happens next? If the books were about dinosaurs, or perhaps some other science related theme; I might have found them interesting enough to stick with them. But for the most part they weren’t.
In fifth grade I was the only student in our class in the GT, or gifted and talented, math program, but not the reading one. So I got placed in the GT reading program for scheduling purposes. It was like skipping a grade of reading which placed me further behind than I already was. I would always be the last to finish reading assignments in class and I wouldn’t get as much out of the readings as the other kids. Eventually I began skimming the assigned texts instead of reading them in full, which led to my further disengagement from reading.
At that age, I would still go back to the library where I grew up reading books I found interesting. Most of the time I’d grab some non-fiction book with pictures of dinosaurs or minerals that I thought looked cool and read what I could from the descriptions. This helped introduce me to words that I wouldn’t see till much later in my education. I was able to figure out the meaning of those words by where they were located in the sentence and by what was depicted in the images above the descriptions. In a way, I was teaching myself and having fun doing it. In school I didn’t find reading fun and eventually let those feelings about reading take over, leading me to decide I didn’t like reading.
Once I made the decision that I no longer liked reading it was easy for me to follow along with the crowd and just say I read. By middle school the only reading I’d do was skimming through the books we were assigned to read and through spark notes. I stopped reading for fun and this trend continued up to the present day. It worked for me and I was able to make it to college with pretty good grades and a good GPA. But I missed out on all the potential knowledge that I could have acquired if I had only sat down to read a book every once in a while. Enjoying reading could have led me to reading whole chapters of textbooks instead skimming through them just getting the definitions of words that would be on future tests.
Now a days I like the idea of sitting down and reading a good book but fail to ever do so. I tell myself I just don’t have the time to sit down and read every day. Nor do I have a book that I’d be interested enough in to read. Not to mention the last time I went to a library was so long ago that I wouldn’t know where to even begin. The best way for me to overcome this cycle of doubt is to just go out, get a book, and make a schedule of when to read it on my free time. Doing this will not only improve my own reading ability, but give me a lifelong hobby. Perhaps going back to the North Wayne Library would help spark some ambition to begin reading again.
Looking back, effort was a big factor of my literacy. In elementary school I put in the effort outside of school because I found it fun and interesting. As I got older I lost that fun and interesting side of literacy and my skills started to reflect it. If I can find a way to make reading and writing fun and interesting for me that would help me stick to it and inevitably increase my skills.
