Reading Impact

    Reading and I have complicated relationship. When I made the transition from elementary to middle school I switched school districts, so I was forced to insert myself in a new environment. First day of school my new reading teacher asks for our summer reading assignment, and I was completely lost. After explaining my situation to my teacher, she sent me to the library and asked me to check out The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. I wasn't as interested at first, because it was an assignment, but as I got further into the book I completely fell in love with it and did what I could to complete the series. When I entered high school, the summer and school reading assignments started to get more "difficult", and didn't have the Greek monster fighting adventures that Riordan included in his books. Our classes were instructed to read novels such as: Old Man and the Sea, Macbeth, Wuthering Heights, Lord of the Flies, and other classics. Reading started to become a task instead of an enjoyable pastime. Now that I'm older, I have an appreciation for those texts but it definitely created a rough patch for me to get over. My sophomore year in high school I took AP World History, and my lovely and fabulous teacher, Mrs. Victoria Ellis, required for us to do a lot of reading for her class. I realized that I enjoyed her reading assignments more because I was fascinated by the events that occurred in history and how it impacted how we live today. We started to learn about the authors who wrote those well known classics, and why those novels are still relevant to today. Thanks to her, I was able to get over my rough patch a bit and help me appreciate the power of reading. Now that I have my own classroom, my goal is to show students the value of reading and understanding why author's share their ideas and that one day they can be a world renown author and teachers will be using their texts to share with their students. 

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