Learning to read and write was not particularly hard, but it still took a long time before I was proficient doing it. To 6-year-old-me, reading and writing was just a thing grown-ups forced me to do to keep me away from my toys and the TV. I did not have any interest in doing it because it felt like a chore. Every second I spent practicing my reading was a second I spent away from my toys. Letters were not entertaining at all. My parents were constantly called to school to talk about my low grades and missing assignments. The material was not hard to understand, I simply preferred doing other things.
At some point after second grade, my parents enrolled me into a tutoring program to help Improve my reading and writing skills. The program ran
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Even children books just seemed like a boring attempt at forcing kids to start reading. Comic books felt different, their only purpose was to entertain me. If I did not understand a word I could just fall back to the images in the panel and I would still understand what was happening. The tutoring sessions soon became comic book reading time. My tutor was a fan of anything done by Marvel. He had a huge collection of comic books he was willing share with me if I asked. As he introduced me to content aimed at older audiences, content I was probably not supposed to read at the time, I realized that my reading comprehension was horrible. These comic books had more text and the art was sometimes more surreal so it was hard to understand. Soon after, I began practicing my reading with the sole purpose of understanding the full picture of the stories on each issue. I wrote down all the words I did not understand and looked them up. Then, I would read the comic all over again. I was amazed at how different the story felt when you could comprehend all the things the characters said. I was particularly interested in the sci-fi genre. Not because I liked stories set in futuristics societies, but because these stories often threw a bunch of scientific gibberish that that was interesting to research. I would sometimes pick up science books and read entire chapters just to be able to judge if a scientific concept used by an author made sense. I felt smart when they did not. After a while, my reading comprehension improved tremendously and so did my grades. I was still pretty lazy and preferred not doing my homework, but I could read an entire quarter worth of material just a few days before the exams so I was always at the top of my class. Those results really show how broken the school system was even back then. Improving my grades meant I no longer needed a tutor so