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The Precocious Literate As early as my memory serves me, I have had an unquenchable thirst to read and write.

My desire to read and write is simply driven by my want and need for knowledge. My mother and grandmother always sponsored this ambition of mine; for that I am thankful. As a result, I have always been quite the precocious reader and writer. Yet life being the way it is, nor I, or my family, could have predicted just how much Mrs. Adler would positively impact my literacy. The two years I spent in her classroom are what shaped me in to the writer I am today. I entered the seventh grade as a child with a general distaste for formal education. As I mentioned formerly, it was never a case of me not wanting to learn, it was simply a case of me wanting to learn things in my own way. I process and retain information in a unique way. I am rebellious in nature in regards to academics and life in general. Mrs. Adler was the type of teacher that encouraged learning of any type. It was in her classroom, where I learned many of the things about writing and reading with comprehension that I remember to this day. These bits of information have stuck with me because of the manner in which she taught. Mrs. Adler was a teacher that not only came to school day in and day out with a cache of readily available knowledge, but she would also go home every day having learned something from each of her students. She was talented at identifying her students needs and teaching every lesson in a way that accommodated each and every student. Early on, Mrs. Adler learned how to involve and teach concepts that would stick with me for years instead of weeks or days. Some of these concepts included grammar, content within writing, and how to focus my creativity. Adler would teach all of these concepts in almost a subliminal way. A way in which the student was enthralled about the lesson and thankful to gain what it was the lesson aimed to teach.

I appreciated Mrs. Adler's methods at the time, but I was truly unaware of how these tactics would help in terms of the bigger picture. The grammar lessons always seemed to be the easiest of the objectives; while focusing my creativity proved to be the most challenging dilemma. To combat this, Mrs. Adler would encourage me to find an appropriate outlet. One that would help focus my thoughts toward the assignment. If I was to write a small paper on the significance of a particular scene in a book; I would draw how I conceived the scene before writing about it. To instill grammar in to my writing habits my classmates and I played a game called tag team grammar, or "TTG" as we called it. Mrs. Adler would draft two separate sentences with the same number and type of errors. As a class, we would divide into two teams and work cohesively to fix the errors as fast as possible. Whichever team edited the sentence correctly first would gain a small reward. My classmates and I also practiced and implemented etymology. We would receive lists of prefixes and suffixes and be tested on general definitions and usage of them in complete words. This greatly improved my ability to effectively use and improve my vocabulary. Something I still strive to add to nowadays. Mrs. Adler would also seek to learn what motivated each student personally. I recount receiving a good few packs of spearmint gum to reward me for overcoming common drawbacks, (such as my habit of procrastination.) If it wasn't for her personalized approach to teaching, I would never possess the amount of literacy I do today. I am thankful that I not only had her as a teacher my seventh grade year, but also for my eighth grade year of schooling. It was a unique opportunity not many other people are granted. Within my seventh and eighth grade years I did a fair share of reading too. I had always liked to read, but I had developed a distaste for it once assignments like book reports and what not became the norm. As with everything else, Adler's approach to meeting state standards for reading were different. My classmates and I were

sometimes given options among two or more books. I would have to say my favorite read while in her class was Homer's The Iliad. I enjoyed attention to detail and diction; because it was not like anything I had read in the past. I will be the first to admit that I enjoy literature that is from the distant past because I am intrigued how vocabulary and common word usage varies over the years. I myself, try to implement outdated phrases and words in my day-to-day speech because it makes for a more interesting conversation with my peers. Currently I do not read or write recreationally. When I do read, it is via the internet, browsing for news that is interesting to me. While finding news I have any overt feelings for is increasingly difficult, I must seek the food for thought I so often feel famished for. I have no reservations about reading or writing in my free time. I just don't really have much time to do so. I am certain though, that in the future, I will catch up on all the things I haven't had time to read or write about. I am thankful to have had the literacy sponsors I have had. I am well aware that I have been blessed with positive influences for literacy and am absolutely thankful for those that have fostered reading and writing to be part of my usual habits. Furthermore, I am grateful to have the ability to read and write as well as I can. So from my earliest memories to now; I am as thirsty as ever for the water from the fountain of literary knowledge. I just hope that this parched demeanor doesn't come to a point where absolute satisfaction is met.

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