Last week's lecture on teaching strategies and curriculum made me think of how I learned how to read, both in and out of school. As a literature major now, I'd like to think that something about the way I was taught as a child led me to love reading enough to choose to study it. Even if nowadays I repeatedly question both my abilities and my interest for reading, the fact that I liked reading throughout elementary and high school and that I thought I would be good at it in college, is most probably linked to how I learned early on.
It's practically a given that because my family is in the academe, I grew up with a lot of books, most of them beyond my abilities at the time. But beyond that, I think also because I'm both the youngest at home and among my cousins, by the time I was growing up my family knew exactly how to guide me.
A part of the lecture last week focused on developing a love for stories first and foremost -- to develop a love for reading, kids need to be interested in stories. Some of my fondest memories as a child are the times when my parents would tell me bedtime stories they'd make up on the spot. At the time I thought it was fun and funny, and sometimes that they were too lazy to get a book to read to me, but now I realize that it was a really creative way to get me interested in stories. As I got older though, they started to introduce me to books, but looking back, I realize that they didn't read me picture books or story books throughout. Probably by the time I was in kinder or grade one, my dad would start reading short novels to me, a few chapters a night. We'd read books by people like Roald Dahl, and while they were short, at the time I thought they were for kids a bit older than me.
But I think that's a big part of why I not only learned to love reading, but also why I became so ahead of my classmates -- my parents knew that they had to push me, but they also knew how.
The Aunt I'm closest to, my father's sister, was a Comparative Literature major too as an undergrad, and she genuinely loved reading as well. I think while my parents equipped me with the tools and abilities to read, it was ultimately my Aunt who made me interested. For almost all my birthdays in elementary school, she'd give me several novels -- staple reads for young girls, and almost all of them Newberry award-winning books. I wasn't just exposed to books, I was exposed to good books.
But ultimately, what sustained my love for reading was school. The lecture mentioned UPIS and how different strategies are tested out, but what I liked the most about my elementary education, and even part of high school, was the Gates reading test we'd have to take every year. I'm probably part of a minority when I say this, but I really think that test, and the fact that our results were given to us every year, pushed me to improve and to read even more. Knowing where I stood in terms of reading ability gave me that push I needed to read more, and better my score every year. In sixth grade my reading was college-level, and by my last test in sophomore year high school, I was a fourteen year-old who read like I was twenty.
Based on my personal experiences, I think learning how to read is a two-sided equation -- our class, as educators and part of the school, should stay key figures in teaching functional literacy, but I also think that no matter how well we teach kids how to read, if they aren't continuously exposed to reading-conducive environments outside of the classroom, there's only so much we can do.
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