Literacy Narrative

In my early life, I was never a very big fan of reading or writing. It was only until people in my life helped to show me the beauty that is reading and writing at different times throughout my life. There weren’t many people that helped me realize this, but the people that did, had a huge impact on who I am today. One person that helped me to realize how much fun it was to read and write was my mom. My mom is a very demanding and loud woman, so unless she gets what she wants, you will hear about it from her for a long time. One thing that my mom always wanted me to do was to read and write in my free time rather than waste my youthful mind away in front of a tv screen. If my mom caught me doing something that wasn’t reading or writing, I would have to immediately stop whatever I was doing and get to reading and writing. This was an extremely important aspect in my life, because not only was reading and writing being enforced by the teachers in my life, but also by my mom, who I look up to and respect. One important event that I can vividly remember to this day is a situation that happened in my 4th grade english class. For the year, my teacher had put up a board where she would put stickers next to each students name every time they completed reading a book. At first, I didn’t really think anything of it, because who cares about reading books? Well, one day, for a parent teacher conference, my mom came into the classroom and looked at the board where it showed everyone’s reading progress over the course of the year, and everyone had at least 10 books completed, but I only had 2. After the parent teacher conference, my mom came home and yelled at me for hours, and for a good reason. How loud she was speaking, or what she said isn’t what upset me that day, but the entire idea of me not being as good as other people in the eyes of my own mom is what really crushed me. My mom had always wanted me to excel in school, and once she saw that I wasn’t doing just that, she became furious. After this parent teacher conference, my mom made it a rule that everyone in the house had to read every night before bed. After around 2 weeks, I was already caught up to all the other people in my class, and at the end of the year I had surpassed everyone in my class by a landslide. This was one of the most helpful things that my mom has ever done because, it really motivated me to read, and it showed me just how much I enjoyed reading. This, to me, is a very important moment in my life because if it didn’t happen, I would likely be a very different person than I am today. Today, I very much enjoy reading and writing, and if it weren’t for that parent teacher conference in 4th grade, then I probably would not like to do either of those things, and I have no one to thank for that except my mom.