Comp2 Paper1 Draft Evan Harrington.docx

Evan HarringtonTeresa GreenENGL 1140-00322 January 2009From R. L. Stine to Stephen KingI have and have always had a strong internal drive to read. As I grew up large external influences on my personal development in reading and were my parents, school reading list programs, and Toledo Public libraries. These different entities helped me learn to read and influenced what I read. Later in life my literacy was mainly dependent on my own desires to read literature and serve my escapist tendencies. My secondary education experience was compromised by the school system's need to prepare the student body en mass for standardized testing.My first memories of attempting to read involved the comic strip section of the newspaper. In particular I remember slowly making my way through a Calvin and Hobbes strip one morning as my parents read other parts of the newspaper and occasionally helped me with a word I couldn’t quite sound out. During the same time period I remember using very primitive computers in kindergarten and/or first grade, learning to read and spell short three letter words like “dog” and “eat”. The elementary school I attended was Raymer Elementary; which often had book fairs and reading programs in association with the Locke branch library. Raymer also had a nice little library located on the premises. I used this a little for school assignments, but most of my book borrowing took place at Locke branch, as everyone called it.In perhaps second grade, the school gave out sheets with twenty blank lines on them as part of a reading program. The students were to read a book, write the title on a line, and then have a parent or guardian initial the line proving that the student had actually read the book. This is the first fuzzy memory I have with reading used as a school assignment. I quickly read all the children’s picture books I needed to fulfill the requirement and then some. My parents were always helpful with taking me to Locke branch (when I was still too young to walk) and encouraging my reading habits. As I remember, the teachers were encouraging, but definitely focused on helping the children who weren’t having such an easy time of it. I suppose they thought that it would be discouraging for the other children to see a fellow student be congratulated with reading all the books so quickly. My school and local library, along with support from my parents, were the main forces that began the snowball of my literacy.From grades three to six I visited the Locke branch library at least twice a week. I usually got a new Goosebumps book to read each time. Eventually I read the library’s small collection of those books and my parents would buy me ones I hadn’t read. I ended up with almost one hundred of them by the time I grew out of them. In about the sixth and seventh grade I realized one day, after reading possibly the last Goosebumps book I had ever read, that it only took me an hour to read it. I had in fact read half of it on the way home. I knew that I needed to read bigger “more adult” books. I was temporarily lost, besides Goosebumps and a handful of Animorphs books I had read almost nothing else. Then I noticed the other books that were about the house; my mother loved to read horror novels. At the age of twelve or thirteen I made the radical jump from R. L. Stine to Stephen King. I can’t remember which book of his it was exactly, but I loved it. From the time of early Junior High School to late High School I exploded into the world of contemporary adult literature. I read a great many of King’s novels and branched out into other authors such as: Michael Crichton, Douglas Adams, J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, and many others.All my life I was very much a person with a penchant for escapism. I loved all fictional things such as books, video games and movies. Desire to see into another reality than my own really fueled my desire to read and to become a better reader. This not only made me more eager to read fiction for school, but to also read books on my own; purely for enjoyment. My mother said she had a similar experience. She grew up very poor, her father having abandoned the family and only had my grandmother to take care of them. She was keen on escaping this economically poor setting and took to reading fiction to help her cope. My mother's reading skills developed substantially because of her escapist tendencies, much like me.The discovery of new, more challenging fiction to read was entirely due to my mother’s reading habits and my own curiosity and desire to read. After elementary school my formal education had very little to do with what I read. The educator’s focus moved from encouraging the students to read to just trying to make sure more than half the students graduated high school. Standardized testing was a looming specter for many of the students and the teachers had to focus on a teaching style that helped the students with the tests or the already high drop-out rate would rise. Studying short excerpts from textbooks slowly gained the upper hand over reading a story. The school system's urgency to get the students through high school and then into a vocational school or college (no other options were presented) appeared to gloss over the importance of being able to read well. The fervor of getting the students through high school despite having the literacy of elementary school children may have badly crippled the future education of many students who decided to attend college or attempt anything that involved intensive reading comprehension skills.The only significant moment formal education had for me after elementary school was during an over-the-summer reading assignment during high school. The teachers gave the honors English students a list of books they could read and then write a book report on: the report to be turned in on the first day of class next year. I chose to read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, thinking it was going to be a science fiction or horror story about an (you guessed it) invisible man. I certainly never would have read Invisible Man normally and it was good for me to expand my literary horizons in that direction. I see it as quite pathetic that the most important moment in my high school literacy development was an accident. Another point brought about by the over-the-summer reading assignment being that only a small portion of the school’s student body was expected to be able to read a single book over the course of three months. This small group of students were in fact considered the smarter English students. Reading one book in three months seems like it would be an easy task for sixteen/seventeen year olds, but the truth was that the vast majority of the students were terrible readers. Even in the honors English classes the majority of time spent on a particular novel was spent reading the book slowly and out loud. Only a very small amount of time was put aside for discussing the book’s tone or characters or themes.Early on my literacy was heavily assisted by my parents and school. As I grew older I became more independent and relied mainly on my city’s excellent library system to expand my reading abilities. The Toledo public school system failed to enforce literacy for an adequate length of time, but long enough for me to independently go on and grow into a better reader. Unfortunately, for other students less internally motivated to read, the teachers stopped trying to teach reading skills too soon. But it isn't the teachers or the school administrators who are to blame. I believe they did the best that they could with the restrictions they had to face knowing their students faced standardized tests that would determine whether they passed or failed high school.