Ella Brownstein

Professor Strehle

English 1101-521

14 September 2018

My Experience as a Reader

Who actually enjoys reading and writing?​ I ask myself this every time I get told I have to

go pick up a book and read. For me, reading has never been one of my favorite things to do.

Even though I truly do not enjoy reading I still have to because I am a student. Ever since I was

in elementary school, I have dreaded reading. If I had to choose reading or writing I would one

hundred percent choose writing. This is because I am not a very good reader and I can never get

myself to enjoy reading something. There is only one person who has ever sort of made me not

hate reading and her name is Mrs. Leugers.

Mrs. Leugers was my second and third grade teacher. I went to a school in Columbus,

Ohio where we had one teacher for all of our subjects. She taught me Math, Science, History and

Language Arts. One thing that I had always loved and been good at is math. I liked how there

was always a right or wrong answer and I liked solving things. Therefore, reading doesn’t have

much in common with math. I could never really relate reading to math so I just never found a

way to enjoy it. Reading takes a lot of time and to sit down and take a lot of time on something

that you do not enjoy, is not fun. I was lucky to have a teacher like Mrs.Leugers though. She

helped me a lot with my reading skills.

In the third grade we started these things called reading checks. Reading checks happened

every other week. I absolutely hated reading checks when I was in elementary school. I can
remember the sitting in class while the teacher would pull us out one by one to do these reading

checks. By the time she would get to me I would be sweating and anxious. We go in the hall and

she hands me an excerpt from a book and she gets her stopwatch out. That piece of paper with

the story on it was so intimidating. I can remember sitting there when she was setting the timer

for three minutes, my heart was pounding and my hands were sweating. She’d say go and I

would begin reading. I knew I couldn’t use my finger to trace the words and that made

everything worse. I would feel her judging me on the words I had messed up on and how slowly

I was going. That timer would go off and I would feel so defeated. Everytime I felt like I was the

slowest reader in the class and I was always embarrassed. I would go back into the class and

everyone would talk about how far they got in the story and it would be a lot farther than where I

got to. My third grade self thought reading checks were the worst things ever.

The days that I knew we had a reading check I would get so nervous. My stomach would

feel as if it were in a knot. When I would take the reading check it was like the lines I was

reading were never ending. I would be reading the story and could feel the nerves getting to me

as I barely reached the end of page two and then all of a sudden the timer would go off. I just

knew that I didn’t get very far and that I was going to feel disappointed in myself. I didn’t ever

want to walk back in the classroom to hear everyone else talk about how far they were getting

each week. Megan would say “I got to page 5,” and my other friend would reply smiling, “I got

to page 6 today!” I would think to myself, ​How did I only reach page 3?​ I wasn’t improving very

much every week in my reading. Mrs.Leugers noticed that and began to have me stay after

school. We would sit at her desk and practice reading. “You should sit on your hands during our

silent reading Fridays so that you do not use your finger to trace the words,” she would tell me. I
tried that and it actually began to help. I would stay after school with her one to two times a

week and eventually I started getting better and reading checks became less scary. Even though I

got better at reading I still never enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say I hated it but I really did not have

much interest in it. I would rather sit down and watch a video or listen to an audio book.

By the end of my 3rd grade school year, I had gotten to where all of the other kids in my

class were at in the reading checks and almost better than some. I had finally gotten over my fear

and I can thank Mrs. Leugers for that. She saw that I was struggling and she helped me and I

appreciated it. I had her as my teacher for two years and to this day she is still my favorite

teacher. It is weird to think that I can remember so much from when I was in elementary school

but when you have someone in your life that impacts you in a positive way it is hard to ever

forget them and what they did for you. She helped me grow as a reader and as a person because

she taught me how to overcome fears. Even when I did not have her as a teacher anymore I

would still go talk to her because I looked up to her. Mrs. Leugers was a great role model and an

even better teacher.