The Men On Horses
I learned how to read from history books. Not by myself of course. I had a lot of help from a very important person in my life. I remember I was 4 years old flipping through my aunts books looking at all the cool pictures (though at the time I didn’t know what was happening in these pictures). As any young boy does, I was investigating. Investigating this massive history book and being intrigued by the pictures and wanting to know what they meant.
Debby (my aunt), is a history teacher who has a very particular way of teaching, and that teaching just happened to be very stern. Her teaching style with me though was very patient and really fun. The thing I remember most when she was teaching me was just how much fun she would be having. She would always have a smile on her face and the tone of her voice when explaining things to me was just so up-beating.
I remember the first time my aunt and I sat down at my kitchen table and opened up one of her history books. I was flipping through the pages looking at anything that caught my eye. Though the pictures in the book were too complex for me to understand. We sat down together and all she would do is read the page to me and all I would do is sit and listen. Being a 4 year old that makes it a little hard but I tried it anyways. After she was done reading the passage to me, she would show me all of the pictures that were related to that passage. She would describe to me in great detail what is happening in these pictures and also how the words relate to the picture. At first I had no idea what I was looking at and even when she would try to describe to me the words and their correlation with the pictures, I just wasn’t catching on.
After hours and hours of listening to my aunt read and show me these detailed pictures I slowly started to understand the relationship with words and pictures. One picture that I will never forget was of a man riding on a horse with many other men on horses. When I saw this picture I pointed at it and said “horse!” “horse!” to my aunt. The look on her face was full of pure bliss. After sitting down at my kitchen table time after time after time listening to my aunt and looking at pictures I was able to correlate the picture of a horse to the word “horse”. Looking at how excited my aunt was it made me feel really great about myself but the thing I didn’t know then was that, that moment would be the base for much bigger things to come in my educational career.
Most people I know learn how to read from looking at comic books or maybe looking at sport magazines.The way I learned how to read was by looking at pictures in a history book. Very unusual I know, but the way I was taught has helped me get to where I am at right now in my academic career. Learning how to correlate pictures and words at such an early age helped me with my vocabulary in my early years of school. While other kids in my 2nd and 3rd grade classes were struggling reading and writing, I was able to complete readings a lot quicker and was able to understand more of the things I was reading.
I was just 4 years old when something significant happened to me and what I learned in that moment I have taken with me to this day. The excitement and confidence I had in that moment was indescribable.To some people this might not seem too significant but to me this was a big foundation for my education. I have only but my aunt to thank. Debby made a big impact on me early on in my education and still to this day has big influence on me.
