Ayla Elledge Professor Campbell UWRT 1101-059 09 October 2014 Ko pie vi wo iteracy Narrative > (st 4 Ever since I can remember, I have always loved reading. I would read anything I could get my hands on. When I was a kid, my mom would go to thrift store and yard sales and come home with bundles of new books for me to read. It didn’t matter if the book I was currently reading wasn't that great; | x ‘would read it to completion anyway. Reading was a source of comfort and 7 escape for me and I cherished it. I thought this would never change. I had an infallible love for reading, or so I thought. When I was 14, this theory was tested and disproved. | the first time I ever hated reading. I was a freshman in high school and I was in Mrs. Jung’s advanced placement English class. First of all, advanced high- school English was unlike any English class I had previously taken. Our literary units went by fast and didn’t leave much time for in-depth interpretation. This class was sig worse by the fact that I passionately nada) Mrs. Jung. She was a woman, She was stri ae , Tude and #, condescending. Naturally, she and I never saw eye to eye. It waif there was a hit put on me the very instant we ne despised her, but my hatred for what we read that semester was even greater.a I walked into class and sat down with my books, prepared sit through another boring lecture on grammar. Once the tardy bell rang, Mrs. Jung announced that we should take out our books. “Turn to page 308, we're going to start reading and deciphering an epic today,” she said. Once we all got to the page, she asked us to read the next 10 pages so that we could discuss it. We \ ‘were going to be reading a mass amount of excerpts from The Iliad. After I s oo finished those 10 pages, I came to the conclusion that I had never in my life disliked reading something more. It was dull, dry, and I hated it; and I hated Fenny her for being the one to make me suffer through this unit. During that first lesson, I don’t think I learned gene thing saa” We continued our segment on Homer over the next month and it was like pulling teeth. I would go to class, try to take in what we were supposedly learning about The Iliad, fail miserably, and then head to my next class. I ended up failing the whole unit on epics and decided to continue to hate Mrs. Jung for the rest of the semester. Fora long time afterwards, I struggled with reading anything I didn’t like A ent seemed boring or started off too slow, I was reminded of how much I hated reading that book and being forced to read it. How it did nothing for me. I would imagine Mrs. Jung's sneering face at me failing the I would hear her voice droning on about the significance of Something. ao and my mind would shut oft Sy feel silly because it was novice to think that I wouldylM¥@ everything I read in my lifetime. | was unprepared for Cxce0 the realization that I would eventually read something that I didn’t like. I let myCommie hiccup wit jowledge over the course of the nest few years. jurt me idally because anytime a book didn’t immediately a 7 Mpecatl? grab my attention, I would stop reading it. I wouldn't even give this new book a chance because I had taught myself that I couldn't understand or finish a book 1 didn’t like in the beginning. I had taught myself to shut down and give up on goat 1nrig ht ‘a certain facet of reading. I was stuck in a stubborn rut of a form of illiteracy. Z ollegg tit | realized how important it was break myself of this habit. If | didn’t learn to read and comprehend things that bored me senseless, I was going to be at a major disadvantage. | Rue Everyone around me was reading academi em, but they were making the best of the situation. They knew tij@ithey couldn't shut down. use some text wasn’t to their liking. Professors expected more ‘woul force myself to read things outside of my comfort zone and learn away to absorb them as well. | started slowly with articles that were ina dialect I didn’t understand. What a better way to learn how to power through horrible reading than to start with wordy literature. My mom lent me her Norton’s anthology of American literature and I began my expansion there. It wasn’t a short process either. There were many times | threw that anthology across the room and said “Screw this.” Luckily, that book was tough and could Funny, ‘ put up with my abuse as I grew intellectually. To this day, | still struggle with = I don’t enjoy. I don’t think I will ever grow out of the irritation I fee! .ding something that doesn’t lev're net alone—capture me, but I have learned the discipline to get done what needs to be done. Instead of hating every moment I read such a text, I try to remind myself (,..., that someone out there enjoys what I'm reading. There may even be someone (eupetive who consider current boring book to be their favorite work of literary art. pine I remember that I must put myself in their shoes and try to see something valuable and intereMi@peneath all the wordy clutter. Ascribing to that mindset is what gets me through the slower, more daunting texts. It has taught me a lesson that can only be learned through experience: Anything worth obtaining will be difficult at some point and will contain a struggle that tests our ability to continue forward. For me, it was reading excerpts I hated when I'd been happy with most everything I'd previously read. For someone else it may be completely different. Another person may face the struggle of leaning to read at all or to find any book that captivates their soul. Just as I overcame my difficulties with reading, I hope that others with a similar (or contrary) struggle find a way to cope with and rise above their inabilities. 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