Literacy Struggles by Sophia

Literacy Struggles by Sophia - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

I was one of those kids who needed extra help in reading, writing, and even speech because of my speech impediment. During the time I was learning how to read it involved teaching a kid how to read by having them read out loud. Imagine a little girl sitting down in an empty classroom where it's just her and the teacher. The teacher pulls out a timer and tells the little girl to start reading out loud, but every time the little girl mispronounces a word that has an r sound. This teacher keeps on making the little girl repeat the word until she pronounces it correctly and the timer goes off within the first few sentences of the story when most kids at the time could complete the full story. I had to go through exactly that and was always so embarrassed because I knew what the words meant, just not the correct pronunciation.

A few years down the road to second grade I’ve experienced the worst thing to ever be created by mankind. The spelling test. For me as a little kid I would dread the days that a spelling quiz was one going as far to pretend that I was sick and needed to stay home. I mean we would learn how to spell words then we were expected to not only know how to spell the word, but how to use it in a proper sentence. Now I’m not just worried about how I spelled the initial word, but now I’m also worried if I wrote a proper sentence using the word correctly as well as spelling all the other words correctly. People always told me that I would get better over time or if I studied more I wouldn’t struggle with spelling.

In third grade my hatred for literacy changed to love. All the way up to this point each student wasn’t allowed to read out of their reading level. How did they come to get their reading levels you may ask? Well they would take accelerated reader tests of course. For some reason my third grade teacher allowed me for the first time to read higher than what my reading level was supposed to be. It was my first time being able to read books that didn’t have any pictures in them at all. The book that I picked up first with my new found freedom was a “Magic Tree House” book called “Dinosaurs Before Dark” . This choice will forever change my life. After reading the book I finally started to pass my AR test since I was interested enough to remember the answers to the questions they asked.

Now I’m going to skip a couple of years ahead to seventh grade. By this point I understood writing and the importance of it. I would write all the time during this period, let it be poems for myself or even the occasional start of a fiction story that popped into my head. Even though I started to love writing for myself at this time I hated academic writing. Every major test I dreaded writing extended response questions. It always left me wondering what I might have written wrong or if I used the wrong grammar. During this time I still had problems with what a verb and an adjective were. It really wasn’t till I had Mrs. Klein in eighth grade that all of that change due to the amount of homework she sent home with us. No matter how much I complained about doing all of that work it changed my writing ethic. My papers started to look more structured and had a better flow.

This leads me to where I am now with all of these past teachers that I have to thank for my love of literature. I may not like writing as much as all my other classes but it has been an important part of my life. Just looking back and seeing the improvement of years of stubbornness of not giving up on my writing, gives me hope that one day I might not see it as a chore to get my writing done. For now, I’m content with knowing that I at least have a love for reading and free writing.