Personal Narrative-Accelerated Reading

Some people may have these intricate, and long stories about how they learned to read that may make them seem like heroes, or a warrior on a battlefield. I don’t have one of those stories. I learned to read like any other little girl-- through reading and repetitiveness. Just vocabulary words, and little kid books about puppies getting into trouble or going on adventures. I actually ended up naming one of my dogs after my favorite troublesome puppy, his name is Biscuit. Every single night my mom and I would pick out a book from the shelf to read before I went to bed, this is probably where I took my very firsts steps in reading. After that, unlike some of you uncultured swine, I continued my adventures in reading in Pre-K. I actually

Going into elementary school, I was introduced to this dreadful thing called Accelerated Reading, or better known as “AR.” In kindergarten this was basically just a way to make sure that us small kids were actually reading and understanding the material, I don’t think it was a grade, just a sort of checkpoint, or guidance for the teachers. At this point, the program wasn’t so bad, but as I grew up, the beast that was hidden inside it became more, and more apparent to me. It turned into a competition between students to earn points. The higher difficulty of the book you read, and the higher you scored on the AR tests, the more points you got. You had to get a certain amount of points to get a good grade in the class. This system was supposed to be a way to encourage us beginning middle school students to read, we were supposed to be excited about competing against each other and about the (pointless) rewards, but the opposite is what actually happened. No, we didn’t all band together and stage a revolt, but it made virtually all of us turn against reading and everything it stood for. It was stressful, and, to me at least, was the most horrible thing a teacher had ever asked me to do. It disgusted me and ruined English class for me for a good three years

Both are life skills, and I’m thankful for everything from the little kid books, to the bad stories I wrote, to the little adventures that I still go on every time I open up a book. Reading is something that is so important to being able to function in the world today, there are too many people that cannot do it, which means there are so many people missing out on these little adventures. I know I take it for granted a lot of the time; most people do, but we really shouldn’t. Lots of people would love to be able to read and write and communicate, and we’re here thinking that it’s a given, but it’s a privilege. No one had to teach us how to read or write or any of that. I know that my experience reading would be considered a paradise to some others, and I am eternally