(PAper start)

Savanna McClain

Ms. Chastain

English 100

12/6/10

Education and Learning

            When I was a kid, learning how to read and write was no big deal to me. I thought it was actually fun to be able to write down words that had meanings, and put words together to make sentences and stories. Every chance I got I would be writing in my diary or reading an interesting book. I wrote in my diary quite often. Although my handwriting wasn’t so great at that age, I still loved to write. When I was in second grade I started reading chapter books. My favorite author was Judy Blume. I liked her books because they were interesting to me as a kid, with a lot of detail and pictures. When I was in elementary school I loved to get homework. I liked the way it made me feel like an older kid who gets homework all the time. I started getting older and going to middle school. The older I got, the less and less I enjoyed reading and writing. In sixth grade I started this program at my new school called, reading counts. This program is on the computer and it is a test you have to take that is ten questions long, over the book you signed up with your English teacher. All the students would take a lexile level test before the year started to determine how many points the books we had to read would be. Each book in the library had a number in the inside top left corner that said how many points the books were worth. To pass your reading counts test you would have to get a seven out of ten or better.

            In the story, “The Lonely, Good Company of Books”, written by Richard Rodriguez, he tells us about how his parents only read when they had to. “For both my parents, however, reading was something done out of necessity and as quickly as possible” (232). His parents could both speak English and Spanish. They just didn’t see why people would spend so much time on reading books when they could be getting work done. He tells us that every chance he got he would try to read. He had private classes with the nun every day after school for almost six months to practice reading. He loved to read and he began to get better and better. His mother didn’t understand why he liked to read so much. “…Was so much reading even healthy for a boy?” (234). His mother didn’t think it was necessary for him to be reading books all the time when he could be helping her with chores around the house instead.