In my first memory of books and reading, I run down the hall of parents' house from my bedroom to the living room where my father watches TV. I carry a small worn book called Cheerful, which I am excited about him reading to me. The memory is foggy, but I believe I was not yet able to read myself and that he had read the story to me before.
My father was a huge encouraging influence on my literacy. He read aloud to my sister, brother, and me all the time. Because he read to us all together and mostly read novels, I do not remember any books I read many times as a child other than Cheerful. When I was little, my father mostly read Great Illustrated Classics. Later, he read to us Watership Down at least twice, Jurassic Park, the Client, and many of the Lillian Brown Cat Who ... mystery series. Other times, he would read to us a funny or sentimental piece out of the news paper or a short story from a collection. Unlike most families, from what I recall reading was not a bedtime activity. Instead, my father would read to us after dinner while my mom began washing the dishes and we ate our dessert. Sometimes he would read to us in the afternoon or evenings in the living room or one of our bedrooms, but I remember reading after the dinner the most clearly. Our family didn't do much together, so those nights reading hold a strong sense of family for me.
For as long back as I can remember, reading materials were abundant in the house. My father is a bibliophile and his collection spread out over the house more and more as I grew up. There were books in every single room, and eventually we each owed our own collections. Over the years we also subscribed to various kids magazines like Sesame St, Electric Company, and Cricket. To add to our reading materials, my father took us to the library often, at least once a week, because we lived less than five minutes walking distance from the library. We always took part in the summer reading programs and we were allowed to look at any of the books we wanted in the Children's room. I can not remember a time when I did not have my own library card on which my dad printed my name. Another huge influence on going to the library was the PBS show Reading Rainbow, which was one of the many PBS shows we watched growing up (others included Sesame St, Mr. Rogers, 3 2 1 Contact, Electric Company, Square One, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?). I can vividly remember the books featured on the show; our library had a Reading Rainbow shelf and we often checked out those books.
My father spends a lot of his leisure time reading; his favorites are mysteries. He carried a book and crossword puzzle book with him to work everyday in his briefcase to read on the train and T. He keeps a little notebook of all the books he read. He also buys the Sunday Boston Globe every week, and even though he didn’t always get around to reading it on Sunday, he would eventually go through the stack of them one by one. My father passed his love of reading on to my sister, who is almost four years older than me. I can remember that everything she read, such as the Babysitters Club, the Little House on the Prairie books and the Anne of Green Gables books, I wanted to read, too. Up through early high school, I tried to imitate her reading selections. This is a pattern I see with my reading. I often imitated others and read what they recommended, but this selection strategy usually did not work out well for me.
I did very little reading with my mother, from what I remember. Instead, Mom was who we went to if we needed help with math homework. However, there was one exception. Every week, we had to go to the doctor’s office for my allergy desensitization shots and then wait for the doctor to check the injection site for a reaction. I usually spent my time reading while we waited. The waiting room had several Berenstain Bears books, several Dr. Seuss books for early readers, and Highlights magazines. These were books I read over and over again every week; they were special books I still associate with going to that particular place.
I have hazy memories of how I learned to read. I remember textbooks and groups; I was in the lowest group called Marching Along, which I think was the name of the textbook, in either first or second grade. I also vaguely remember some kind of phonics worksheets. I recall much more clearly that being reading aloud was also a part of my teachers' class routines. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Love You Forever, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Giving Tree, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (the musical Cats was popular at this time), and James and the Giant Peach were all read to me in school. We made frequent trips to the school library too in the younger grades. I particularly liked Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Care Bear books. I remember the librarian directing me out of the picture book section to the books for older readers at some point. At home, my parents quizzed me on flashcards, which I now know worked on building my sight vocabulary. I also know that starting from young age, homework was a priority over play. Even during the summer, my mother bought workbooks for us to do a little bit of each morning before we could play outside or visit friends. This started in the summer after Kindergarten when my brother and I both were unable to write the alphabet.
As some of the details above show, even though I had abundant positive exposure to reading, I was not a strong reader. I vividly remember my mother asking me to read On Beyond Zebra aloud to her, which ended with me crying violently out of frustration at the nonsense words she wanted me to decode. I was in the low reading groups and I knew it. In second grade, Mr. Crump, the school counselor, tested me for special education, though I was not aware of that at the time. The testing resulted in me repeating the second grade. It was not until I got my “permanent record” as an adult that I learned I had an IEP because the accommodations were very limited. At some point, someone told my mother that I am dyslexic, and even though I can not find that anywhere in my old school record, that makes sense to me now. Growing up, I only knew that dyslexia affected my spelling, at which I am still terrible. My big problem was letter reversals (“b” for “d”, “form” for “from”) and omissions. But, I did not know how it affected my reading until I learned more about dyslexia in college. When I was young, I just knew I read slowly. Yet, I do not remember being frustrated in school except for times when I disliked the plot of a text, had to read out loud, or took nightmarish spelling tests.
In early elementary school, I enjoyed Frog and Toad; Leo the Late Bloomer; Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day; and the Serendipity series by Stephen Cosgrove. In fact, I was reading a Frog and Toad book when my father taught me the concept of a bookmark. In the upper elementary grades, we read novels like Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, Tuck Everlasting, and The Whipping Boy. I do not recall what activities we did with them. I know that I was sometimes behind on the reading. This was partly my reading speed, but also partly disinterest in the books themselves. In one of these upper elementary grades we did what I have since been told was SRA reading. It was not a focus, but rather something to work on if we finished our other work. I know I never got far. At this point in time, I tried to mimic the reading of my peers, particularly my friends. I remember reading some of the Little House on the Prairie books and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe at the point because the boy I had a crush on was reading them. These books did not work for me because I still read slowly and my peers could get through these series so much faster than me that it was discouraging. I also tried to read an Ann McCaffery's Dragonsong that one of my best friends loved, but it was way too difficult for me at that time. Instead, I read and loved both the Babysitter's Little Sisters and Babysitter's Club books as well as all the Judy Blume and Calvin and Hobbes books I could find. I also had a subscription to Disney's Adventures magazine.
Around this time, I began to focus more on writing. My second grade teacher, I think it was, had us start journal writing. I liked this type of writing and continued it on my own off and on until the fifth grade when I began writing almost everyday for almost the rest of my public education. In third grade, I entered a nature poetry writing contest and won an honorable mention. Then in fourth grade, I won second place for my age group in a short story contest through the public library; my prize was a bookshelf in which I now store my Stephen King collection. In fifth grade, my teacher had us write creatively as part of our classroom routines. Every so often, we had to revise and publish a story. I continued writing stories and poems at home throughout middle and high school, as well as writing in my diary and writing tons of notes to friends.
As far as reading was concerned, when I hit middle school, I had a big change. I do not know if this is true, but I have been told that the reading and math groups were formed based on math scores. I scored high in math, and thus was placed in the high reading group. I struggled with the material. Often, it was hard to understand and took me a long time to read. We did four different types of assignments in sixth grade. We started the year reading out of a textbook and answering the questions at the end of the selection. In class, we would swap papers at random and share and correct the answers. I hated this; it was embarrassing to have someone else read my answers when I had struggled with the questions. Also, my poor handwriting and spelling were sometimes complained about not only by the students, but also my teacher. Next, we did the grade six Junior Great Books; again, I found the readings hard and I was shy, so participating in the discussions was very difficult for me. Throughout the year, we were supposed to read on our own as well. We were supposed to choose books from a list and all of those books had quizzes on the computer; this was called Electronic Bookshelf. I only read the mandated four books for the year. I still remember all three of the titles: The Late Great Me, Where it Stops Nobody Knows, and The Language of the Goldfish, all three of which dealt with social issues (alcohol abuse, kidnapping, and mental illness respectively) which were not concerning to me at all when I was twelve, so the books were confusing and boring to me. Sometimes in the sixth grade, we read novels together as a class; I remember only one of them clearly: The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is my strongest memory of my whole education. Mrs. Collins assigned it over February or April vacation. My mother made sure that I read some every day and that my work came before play, which was a constant routine in my house, which I was used to and did not really mind. With an adult perspective and some literacy classes under my belt, I know that the sailing terminology was too hard for me without any prior knowledge and that made reading it harder and slower, hence affecting my motivation and interest. But, I dealt with it and read the whole thing. When we returned to Mrs. Collins class, the first thing she did was to ask each of us, in front of the whole class, how long it took us to read the book. She started on the other side of the room from me. My classmates started saying it only took them a couple of hours. I was mortified and humiliated. I had spent an hour or two a day for the whole vacation! I never felt more stupid and inferior at anytime during my education. It was then that I truly realized I was a much slower reader than my peers. By the way, I of course lied when it was my turn and said it took me as long as anyone else. It never occurred to me until I was an adult that others might have lied as well.
Even thought Charlotte Doyle was a very negative experience, I do not think it impacted whether or not I read. The amount of homework in middle school and my focus on my friends used up most of my time. Also, I still focused a lot of free time on writing, either notes to friends, entries in my diary, or stories. All of this did not leave much time for pleasure reading, but I do remember reading continuing my earlier reading habits, but that is about all I remember besides what was required for school. In seventh grade we continued to read Junior Great Books and I continued to struggle with them. We read A Christmas Carol and Tom Sawyer, but also had more choice of what to read, but we had to read certain genres. I read books that were recommended to me by the young adult librarian at the public library, Johnny Tremain and The Ruby in the Smoke, a historical fiction and a mystery, which happened to be historical fiction. I disliked both. Johnny Tremain was boring and The Ruby in the Smoke very confusing, probably because I knew nothing about the Victorian time period in which it was set. I also read a science fiction book recommended to my by my mother, who is a huge fan of that genre. I read a Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, which I also disliked because the story just was not interesting to me, despite the fact he was my mother favorite author. So, in both sixth and seventh grade, I read books adults recommended to me instead of finding books for myself, which resulted in poor matches.
Eighth grade was a pivotal year for me because of my teacher, Mrs. Howland, helped me to regain a passionate love for stories. First of all, that is the first year I can remember actually liking the majority of the texts I was assigned to read. Additionally, that year, we looked at the deeper meaning to literature; we did not just read books for the sake of reading. We learned about symbolism; this whole idea amazed me and made reading like decoding a secret message from the author. I thought all the focus on what else the stories could mean was very fun and interesting, and I was good at it. To analyze a story it did not matter how slowly I read, if I had trouble with the vocabulary or spelling, or if I did not want to talk in class. We read an abridged Great Expectations and Romeo and Juliet, and I loved all of it! I liked the stories themselves and felt fully supported by my teacher, which had not occurred previously, and I also felt smart reading books of such prestige. It was this year that I decided I wanted to teach English.
When I entered high school, I continued to be placed in the high track “honors” English courses and I had a string of fabulous teachers including Mrs. Howland's husband. We read only classic canonical literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Jane Eyre, until my senior year when we read some philosophy and a Toni Morrison novel. I had no choice in what I read throughout all of high school. We read classic novels and Shakespeare as well as poems, short stories, and samples out of anthologies over these years. Every year but freshmen year unannounced reading quizzes were general practice to check if we had read. In all of these classes we discussed the reading, but I rarely participated due to shyness. We also wrote several essays a year about what we read. By this point I was a faster reader, but I was no where near as fast as my high tracked peers. I often had to fake read because I just could not get the reading done on time. Because I was in honors, every year I had summer reading, which I did not mind.
Around the time I entered high school I decided that I was too old to be reading Judy Blume and that I needed to be reading adult books, so I started reading the only adult author I knew anything about: Stephen King. This was my fun reading for the rest of high school. There was not too a lot of time to read with assigned work and social events, but I remember being highly impressed with myself for reading It, my first book thousand page book, in less than a month. I also read books that my best friend recommended, notably Carrie and A Wrinkle in Time. At this time, I would read in my room at night by the clip on light on my headboard. This was pretty much the only time and place I read. I also had a subscription to YM magazine. I still went to the library often and would check out magazines such as Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly with articles about bands or actors I liked.
Throughout high school, I continued to write in my diary all the time. I wrote some short stories and poems as well. I showed one of them to my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Burns. She encouraged me to submit it to my school's literary magazine., Impressions After that, I become involved with the magazine, which was the only extra curricular activity in which I was a part. As a sophomore and junior served on the reading board and my senior year was the editor of fiction. I enjoyed being part of discussions about writing, but most of the other students involved with the magazine were snobby pseudo-intellectuals, which dampened the experience.
Even though I read faster and with more and deeper meaning, a new problem arose my sophomore year. In French 3, I was expected to read a book entirely in French. French 3 is the class that stands out to me as when I cheated the most on my work. I was so stuck and discouraged that I often would just copy my best friend's homework if it was a worksheet. When I was assigned to read The Little Prince in French, I got the English version from the library and read that instead. All of this was highly discouraging and I made the decision I would never be able to learn a foreign language.
Yet in college, I needed four years of a language to earn my degree, so I started again with Spanish. Once I was past the preliminary classes, I had the same problem reading longer texts. I just could not keep all of the vocabulary straight and had to look up words over and over again. I also could not speak or listen to either French or Spanish. In Spanish 4, I had a wonderful Professor who was the first to notice out of my eight foreign language teachers to notice I had excellent grammar, but horrid pronunciation. Professor Wong-Russell invited me to his office hours to help me work on my pronunciation, but I must say that it was too late for me. An intervention like this would most likely have made a massive difference in one of my first years of a language, but at that point my goal was to pass so I could get my degree. Yet, it was my conversation with him that sparked the idea that my dyslexia might be the root of my problem, and so not only was his acknowledgment of me and my difficulty personally meaningful, but the after effects lead to a great understanding of how I learn. After some research on line, I learned that dyslexics have trouble associating sounds and letters. I had my answer to my French and Spanish problems, which still explained my love for Latin. First of all, one does not speak or listen to Latin very much; any speaking or listening was based on written copy I could follow. Second, almost all of our work was translations, so we did everything in the form of stories. It was very easy for me to remember the story details and use that knowledge to work through the words I did not know, unlike French and Spanish where I had no larger context in which to place the texts or a way to use context clues to figure out the words. Understanding why I could not do well in French and Spanish was personally satisfying for me, but also helped me to understand my problems with English, particularly spelling.
In college, I took many and varied literature courses, but focused on American Literature when i could. I was exposed to all sorts of authors I did not know about from high school. I encountered many amazing professors, but Professor Parker and Professor McCarthy stand out the most as encouraging me as a reader and writer. Both of these professors got to know me as an individual and constantly supported and guided me to do excellent work. In college, I got to read some of the texts I read in high school (Huck Finn, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein) again with a deeper focus as well as encountering new texts that impacted me such as The English Patient, The Sound and The Fury, Invisible Man, Othello, and all of Shirley Jackson. Summers were my favorite time for reading though. Summers were when I could read what ever I wanted because I no longer had summer required reading. I learned about banned books and also realized the whole category of young adult literature that I had skipped over and focused a lot of my summer reading on these, as well as discovering Harry Potter.
In college, to save money on the phone bill, IM, email, and letters were my primary form of communication with friends from back home. I also continued writing in my journal and writing stories and poems. I immediately joined the literary magazine at my college, The Onyx. The first two years, it was poorly managed and I did not do too much work, but I was assistant editor my junior year and editor my senior year. I highly enjoyed shaping the magazine with my opinions as well as discussing the submissions, including my own writing. Being editor of The Onyx, although not a prestigious magazine, was my proudest and most satisfying achievement in college. A close second to that experience, was having a paper on Robert Frost win second place in an essay writing contest my junior year. Overall, college was the first time I was in a community of readers and writers who shared the same love of literature as I did. I gained from this a huge sense of belonging on an intellectual level with was missing for me during high school.
Due to some complications with my course load, I graduated college a semester late. I then spent the next six months subbing as I job hunted, subbed, and worked at a local CVS. I missed the college atmosphere a lot during this time; my high school friends had headed in different directions and working two jobs left me feeling very isolated. However, working as a sub gave me a lot of time to continue reading. I luckily found a job without much trouble and moved to Maine to be with my boyfriend, who is now my husband. Again, that summer was lonely as I stayed home in an unfamiliar place when my husband went to work, but I had tons of time to read trade books and novels to prepare for my new teaching position at Leavitt.
The first three years of teaching, I mostly read for my classes I taught and then the classes I was taking, thus reading a lot of professional articles, trade books, and young adult fiction. I had a subscription to some professional magazines, but only read them occasionally. Over the summers I continued to read as much as I could for pleasure. It was not until I took Adolescent Literature with Nancy Hutton in the early summer session that I realized I could read and teach. Since then, I have managed to balance teaching and reading for classes and pleasure. Since moving out and up to Maine, reading is an activity I do on my couch and occasionally before bed. It usually winds up involving a cat sitting on or near me or my book. I continue to read a lot of young adult fiction, but I try to balance it with different kind of adult books from heavy fiction, to light fiction, to trade books, to non-fiction. I have even recently started giving graphic novels a try as well as joining my first book club. I stick to reading stories now and do not write them anymore, though I miss it sometimes, but I blog often including writing the occasional poem.
Having a child was another big change in my literacy. As a stay at home mom, I no longer needed to read trade books for my profession or YA lit. Instead, I spend a fair amount of time reading about babies and parenting, both on line, in books, and Parenting magazine. As far as recreational reading, I seized my opportunity while Natalie was young to read several adult literature books such as Kite Runner, Water for Elephants, and Memory Keeper's Daughter. I remember clearly that the Girl with the Pearl Earring was the book I started the day I went into labor with Natalie. Shortly before becoming pregnant with William, I joined a book club for the first time. I really enjoy getting out for the adult interaction and have been exposed to many books I never would have chosen on my own.
Another huge chunk of my reading is children's literature. I read tons of board books and picture books now, both to Natalie and William. William still reads mostly board books due to his aggressiveness, but Natalie will listen to anything from board books to early readers, giving us quite the range. Most often, reading is just at bedtime now. While I used to read to Natalie during the day, we've fallen out of the habit, and William doesn't usually bring books over to be read. But both kids get read to at bedtime, though Mike reads to William. The other time I often read to the kids is at snacks and lunch at the kitchen table. I do know that there has been a lot less reading to the kids the last few months, which I attribute to Mommy burnout. Instead of reading to them at lunch, sometimes I just want to slip away for a moment. I'm lucky though. They are still read to tons compared to some children, even if we don't hit 20 minutes every day. We take two trips to the library a week and have a huge volume of books both in the house and cycling from the library, usually about 20 - 30 at a time. And, unlike many adults, I really enjoy kids books.
Spending so much time in the children's room of the library has also lead to me reading a lot of children's book for older readers, such as the whole Ramona series, Newbery honors and winners, and revisiting books I read in my childhood. Before William was born, I was reading as many Newbery winners as I could from the last fifty or so years, and I got threw 46 of them. The speed and easy of reading these is nice when time to myself can be limited. My young adult reading has taken the largest hit due to having to go to a separate room and floor of the library to get these titles, but it has not halted. I've only read a handful of YA titles in the last couple of years. One area I've read a lot is graphic novels. I was working on the Sandman series for a while, but tapped out at 6. Instead, I picked up The Walking Dead and have stayed up to date on it. I've also finally read Maus. Additionally, I started to read the Complete Peanuts series and I'm currently waiting on the fourth volume, but after this one I'm not sure where I will get the next several volumes as my library has a gap. As far as non-fiction is concerned, I continue to read parenting books, but not as much as before. My most recent have been about early learning and preschool. I also spent a fair amount of time reading about Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis when Natalie was diagnosed.
