Reading Experience
Reading Experience
Reading Experience
Professor Strehle
English 1101-521
14 September 2018
My Experience as a Reader
Who actually enjoys reading and writing? I ask myself this every time I get told I have to
go pick up a book and read. For me, reading has never been one of my favorite things to do.
Even though I truly do not enjoy reading I still have to because I am a student. Ever since I was
in elementary school, I have dreaded reading. If I had to choose reading or writing I would one
hundred percent choose writing. This is because I am not a very good reader and I can never get
myself to enjoy reading something. There is only one person who has ever sort of made me not
Mrs. Leugers was my second and third grade teacher. I went to a school in Columbus,
Ohio where we had one teacher for all of our subjects. She taught me Math, Science, History and
Language Arts. One thing that I had always loved and been good at is math. I liked how there
was always a right or wrong answer and I liked solving things. Therefore, reading doesn’t have
much in common with math. I could never really relate reading to math so I just never found a
way to enjoy it. Reading takes a lot of time and to sit down and take a lot of time on something
that you do not enjoy, is not fun. I was lucky to have a teacher like Mrs.Leugers though. She
In the third grade we started these things called reading checks. Reading checks happened
every other week. I absolutely hated reading checks when I was in elementary school. I can
remember the sitting in class while the teacher would pull us out one by one to do these reading
checks. By the time she would get to me I would be sweating and anxious. We go in the hall and
she hands me an excerpt from a book and she gets her stopwatch out. That piece of paper with
the story on it was so intimidating. I can remember sitting there when she was setting the timer
for three minutes, my heart was pounding and my hands were sweating. She’d say go and I
would begin reading. I knew I couldn’t use my finger to trace the words and that made
everything worse. I would feel her judging me on the words I had messed up on and how slowly
I was going. That timer would go off and I would feel so defeated. Everytime I felt like I was the
slowest reader in the class and I was always embarrassed. I would go back into the class and
everyone would talk about how far they got in the story and it would be a lot farther than where I
got to. My third grade self thought reading checks were the worst things ever.
The days that I knew we had a reading check I would get so nervous. My stomach would
feel as if it were in a knot. When I would take the reading check it was like the lines I was
reading were never ending. I would be reading the story and could feel the nerves getting to me
as I barely reached the end of page two and then all of a sudden the timer would go off. I just
knew that I didn’t get very far and that I was going to feel disappointed in myself. I didn’t ever
want to walk back in the classroom to hear everyone else talk about how far they were getting
each week. Megan would say “I got to page 5,” and my other friend would reply smiling, “I got
to page 6 today!” I would think to myself, How did I only reach page 3? I wasn’t improving very
much every week in my reading. Mrs.Leugers noticed that and began to have me stay after
school. We would sit at her desk and practice reading. “You should sit on your hands during our
silent reading Fridays so that you do not use your finger to trace the words,” she would tell me. I
tried that and it actually began to help. I would stay after school with her one to two times a
week and eventually I started getting better and reading checks became less scary. Even though I
got better at reading I still never enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say I hated it but I really did not have
much interest in it. I would rather sit down and watch a video or listen to an audio book.
By the end of my 3rd grade school year, I had gotten to where all of the other kids in my
class were at in the reading checks and almost better than some. I had finally gotten over my fear
and I can thank Mrs. Leugers for that. She saw that I was struggling and she helped me and I
appreciated it. I had her as my teacher for two years and to this day she is still my favorite
teacher. It is weird to think that I can remember so much from when I was in elementary school
but when you have someone in your life that impacts you in a positive way it is hard to ever
forget them and what they did for you. She helped me grow as a reader and as a person because
she taught me how to overcome fears. Even when I did not have her as a teacher anymore I
would still go talk to her because I looked up to her. Mrs. Leugers was a great role model and an