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Literary Growth
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Began Learning ABC's
In Kindergarten, we focused primarily on the basic concepts of language, the letters. We didn't take it too much further than this, just the different sounds that they each make and a few simple words. -
Began reading simple short stories
By the first grade, we were reading small books with very direct meaning. We worked with rhymes, words that have more than one meaning, mostly all in the present tense. -
Started Reading all of the Dr. Seuss Books
Around the middle of the first grade, I enjoyed reading all the children's books written by Dr. Seuss. They were easy to understand, and comical. -
Liberty Reading Suffocation
Starting in the second grade, we were required to read on a daily basis. Not only did we have to read a designated amount of pages every night, but we had to take computerized reading quizzes for every book. -
Magic Tree House
Because of all the reading, we had to keep ourselves entertained while reading every night. That's when I and many of my classmates stumbled upon the magic Tree House series. They were an important part of my reading life because they enticed my seven year old imagination. Also, I remember enjoying the clever wordplay with alliteration in the titles. -
Goosebumps
Again, with as much reading as we had to do, Many of use turned to the Goosebumps series. It was more or less collection of children's horror stories, with the level of scary at a minimum. These books I actually would have liked to read on my own, so I didn't really feel "forced" to read them. -
Introduced to the Harry Potter Series
By age 8 I was reading fairly fluently and felt prepared for a book that was well over 100 pages. I had known other people that had read it, and by then, the movies were beginning to come out, so I thought I'd start reading them. I loved the stories, but the level of effort it took to read a book of that size was much higher than I had needed for any book prior. It took me a while to finish the first one, but I was excited to continue reading more of them. -
The Pearl
Reading the pearl in the seventh grade was a new experience for me. That was the first time I had read a book and was then asked to analyze it for its themes and other literary components. Prior to that book, I had only looked at a book's plot. -
Ms. Sullivan's Class
My eight grade year was an all-out bad experience for english in general. I had Ms. Sullivan, an I was honestly scared of that woman. We read a total of three books in that class, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Flowers for Algernon, and Call fo the Wild. In each of which, we had to scrutinize every little detail of the book, and know it by heart just to not get yelled at. That was probably the year that turned me off to reading and anything related to it entirely. -
Edgar Allen Poe
Also in that English class, my already depressed mood about going to english was darkened when we read several different short stories by Mr. Poe. I had never read anything so dark and creepy, so it was almost like a new language. Another turnoff for English. This unit also was covered again through thr next three grades. -
To Kill a Mockingbird
Freshman Year, we read yet another type of book that I hadn't yet been exposed to, A book about racism. I can remember thinking to myself while reading it, "How can he be declared guilty? It's so obvious that the plaintiff is trash, why is the innocent man going to jail?" It was the first book to really open my eyes about how bad racism's effect on people is. -
Of Mice and Men
This book didn't really have a lasting effect on me, but it was another book about how the helpless and somewhat innocent person is the one that gets the raw deal. -
Romeo and Juliet
This was the kind of literature that I would have had no idea what was going on without a teacher to explain it. My problem with reading Shakespeare is just that, even if I read the words, it doesn't translate to modern English for me. I was more or less just listening to what Ms. Thompson said was going on. She might as well have not even bothered to have me read it, and just tell me what happened. -
Greek Mythology
This was a unit that I got through very easily. The book we read was not overly-complicated, Ms. Thompson explained any questions that we had, and it was very straightforward. There was no reading in between the lines, it was all plot. Those are the kinds of books that I would rather come across. -
Lord of the Flies
This was another unbelievably strange book. I still can't grasp the concept of 10 year olds killing each other for no reason other than they disagree. I couldn't follow the psychology of it, and that's why I wasn't able to break the surface of symbolism and other features in that story. There were also some references that I had no idea of, like how "lord of the flies" is another name for the devil. -
John Smith/Early American
Early on in American Lit, we had a unit for very early pilgrim and native american texts. I had a hard time fully understanding the meaning inside these works, but I still found it kind of interesting to look into the first literature works of America. -
Transcendentalists
Our unit with the Transcendentalists was among the most boring for me. For like three months straight, we talked about a bunch of treehuggers from the 1800's. It is not a unit that I claim to have learned much from. -
Huck Finn
I didn't mind reading Huck Finn, but I didn't enjoy all of the socratic seminars that came with it. The book itself was one that I could read easily, get a better-than-usual understanding of its key concepts, and not feel burdened with reading with. Even though it blasted the N word a couple hundred times, it was still a toned down version of what old America was like with slavery and a boy's perception of it. It was probably one of my least hated books. -
Grpaes of Wrath
This was among the toughest reads I've encountered. Also, it was a book that I read for an ORP, so I didn't have a teacher to guide me through it. I still feel like I don't entirely know what was going on in the book. My understanding is that it was a huge family with very little money, searching for jos but somehow never finding one that stuck. I am still bewildered at the ending. -
The Great Gatsby
I'll be honest, the only reason I was looking forward to this book was because the movie had come out recently and I hadn't seen it yet. The book was good, but there was a lot of symbolism that I couldn't interpret at all.
