Don’t Be Ashamed if You’re a “Slow Reader”
You might be in for incredible joy!
My friend confessed she had always been a slow reader. I felt sorry for her. How much she must have missed….
For me, “slow reader” immediately brings to mind the “reading groups” many of us experienced in elementary school. You could go from a crow to a robin to — eventually — an eagle. No one wanted to be a crow, way behind the rest of the new readers.
I was always an eagle, read voraciously, and absolutely hated not being able to read what I wanted. I would take four books home from the school library over the weekend and be done for Monday. Some classmates were lucky to get through one of the smaller “chapter” books.
I would think how sad it was to take so long to get through a book, whether it be fiction or not. How many books do you not get to read because you are so slow at the task? Even worse, how many don’t read at all, based on early school experiences?
This sense of entitlement, that I was better at reading than most of my peers, has lasted for many years. I could look at my lists of “Books Read for the Year” and proudly see I was meeting my goal of 100 books.
Each of the three winters I’ve spent with my friend/teacher colleague, with her doctorate in linguistics, she would…
