I love everything about reading...except reading.

I dislike reading. I feel strange saying this as an educated woman who loves knowledge, stories, and books in general but it is true. It seems that I have never liked reading. When I was a small child I loved to be read to. In fact, my mother read the books we had so many times that I could point to the words and recite it perfectly without actually reading. I loved the pictures, the funny stories, and the wonderful worlds that the books we had contained.

Later when I was introduced to reading in a school setting, I resisted it with all that I had. I colored the pictures and learned the stories by listening to them but I hated learning to read for myself.  I was marked as a slow reader and was often put in the lower ranked reading groups. I struggled with spelling after the 2^nd grade when words stopped being phonetic. It just didn’t come to me. I remember most of my report cards had suggestions of “Have her read out-loud every night.” Reading out loud was one of the worst punishments that could be handed out to me. I dreaded being called on to read aloud and I’m sure my classmates disliked it as much as I did, having to listen to me stumble and stutter over almost every word. It was painful.

Over the years I got better. I became proficient enough to be successful in other subjects but never came to appreciate reading for sport. In the 5^th grade I had yet to read a chapter book all the way through. My mother had to bribe me and finally confine me to my room before I actually finished Ella Enchanted (my first chapter book). In the summer we had an hour reading time right after lunch every day. Sometimes I would read the Magic Tree-house series but most of the time I would daydream and turn the pages every few minutes. I loved going to the library to look at all the books (the look, smell, content, and feel of books was always appealing but never actually reading them). It became a habit to check out a few books, read the first few pages, find them interesting and then return them the next week in exchange for a few more books. I’ve read the first few pages of a lot of books.

Despite my lack of reading, I was an excellent student all through school. Grades became a very good extrinsic motivator for me to read when it was necessary. I also became a very proficient pretender. I read as little as was possible while still maintaining my standing as a good student.   

It wasn’t until I got to college that I learned that I was an audio learner. I finally understood why understanding text was so difficult for me and also discovered that I remedied this by reading aloud to myself in my head. I have to translate words on a page to sounds before I can understand them. It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of time for me to understand what is written on a paper. My spelling is still atrocious for words that I have not memorized the correct sequence of letters.

At this time in my life, I would like to understand how this struggle could have been made easier for me and how it could have been different if there was a teacher that recognized how to help me. I still have a lot to learn about literacy and how I can help those whose struggles are far greater than my own. Everyone should have a chance to decide what they think about reading but at the same time be proficient at it.

For me, literacy doesn’t mean that I have to like reading or writing. I am a successful student without these interests but they have shaped the way that I view how classrooms could be run. In my classroom, I would love to have an audio version of any text that we use. I think that reading and writing, or communication in general, is an essential part of life as well as mathematics and physics, but I also think that we should give students their best chance. I would have been even more successful had I been given the tools that I preferred. We are in a time and age when text is not the only option, so why not use it?