Michael Henderson

Mia Eaker
UWRT 1103
25 September 2014
Literacy Essay
When I was a young boy, from the ages of 6 to 12, reading was my passion. Any time
not spent reading my brain was occupied with thoughts of what I would read next. I wanted to
know what adventure the pages of the next story would take me on. At night when I was
supposed to be in bed asleep I would sneak out of bed and find a light so I could finish the story
that I had already begun but had not finished. I had to know what happened next. I learned to
read at a young age. I read as much as I could, and it changed how my life would go on in the
future. Growing up in an environment where I was always encouraged to read helped me develop
skills that would help me later on in life. It developed my writing and played a big role in my
development as I grew up, and for that I am glad.
My experience with reading began before I can remember, as my parents would read me
bedtime stories for me to fall asleep, but my first vivid memory of reading was a similar
situation. I was very young, probably about three and I was going to bed. My dad decided to read
me a story. My dad read me the childrens abridged version of The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe. My dad would do voices for different characters, and thats when I discovered all the
excitement and interesting adventures that can be told through a book. I wanted to hear more and
more stories. Eventually, as I got old enough, we would take turns reading pages, and I felt that I
became part of the story. After taking turn reading pages, I was able to read on my own, and that
is what I wanted to do.

The Magic Treehouse series was the first series that I really got into, and as soon as I
finished one, I began another. I remember spending all of one rainy day reading that series as
much as I could. As soon as I finished one I would rush to my mom in the kitchen and exclaim,
Mom! I finished my book!, and I would explain what happened in my story. Then I went and
picked another. And another. Each time I finished one I became more and more proud of myself
for the accomplishment. I specifically remember that in the last book I read that day, Jack and
Annie went back to ancient Rome. At dinner that night all I could talk about was the 4 books I
read that day. I would blabber on incessantly about every little detail that I read until my parents
could take it no longer. Reading those books gave me the skill of reading fast, and as I went
through elementary school I always had an advantage over most of the kids there.
One rainy Saturday afternoon I sat on the living room floor creating entire worlds with
my Lego blocks. As I put the final brick on my spaceship and prepared to make it fight another,
my mom came in and said, Do you want to go to the library today?
The library? I asked. I was pretty content with my Legos the way I was.
Yeah, we can pick you out some good books.
Never having been to the library, I wasn't too familiar with the concept. I had always just read
the books that my parents had brought to me. I had read the same stories over and over, and I
was thirsting for something new. We drove to the Towson Library, parked in the garage, and my
mom showed me the kids section. It was designed to resemble a castle. I spent the next half hour
looking through the aisles and aisles of shelves of books, not knowing what to look for. Then I
saw a book with a dirt bike on the cover that caught my eye. It was a Matt Christopher book, a
formulaic series of sports novels that were all pretty much the same. But I loved it. I got more

and more from the library, and I couldn't get enough, I was so interested in the sports that were in
the book that I wanted to read more and more.
I learned that reading was not always fun when we had to read novels in school. In the
fifth grade I had to read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I dont remember too much of
the story, only that it had an annoying, whiny girl as the main character and I did not like the
book at all. We would be assigned to read chapters by a certain date, and after long I would stop
reading the assigned chapters. I would come in to class, and frantically ask my classmate what
the chapter was about in fear that the teacher would call on me and I would have no answer. I
much preferred to read the spy novels that I was into. I could spend hours reading about the
antics that teen spy Alex Rider got himself into, but being forced to read books that I did not
want to read slowed my desire to read to a big extent. I started to favor TV and video games
because after reading a boring chapter of a book I didn't like, the last thing I wanted to do was
read more words on a page. The boring stories I had to read couldnt compare to the hyperstimulation I got from playing Lego Star Wars. I didn't understand that in school we were told to
read certain books for a good specific reason. To learn about different aspects of literature and
broaden our understanding of the world. Instead, I started to associate all school related reading
as bad.
The area where I lived for the first 12 years of my life was a good neighborhood, but the
middle school that I was zoned to attend was very poor. Many of the students of Loch Raven
Middle did not go on to achieve and the quality of education was below what my parents deemed
acceptable. My parents went to the principle at Dumbarton Middle School, a very good middle
school that was 10 minutes away but not in my school zone, and requested special permission for
me to be able to attend. Since the test scores coming out of Loch Raven Middle were so low, I

was allowed to go to Dumbarton instead. At Dumbarton, I received a very high quality

education, and was put on a track of accelerated courses that made my education challenging but
rewarding. They say your grades dont matter in middle school, and that is true, however it was
in middle school that I learned about being a good student and how to have a good work ethic. I
learned how to work through concepts that I struggled with, and it made me better off for high
school. I learned about the basics of writing in middle school. I was assigned my first real essay
by my English teacher Mr. Bauer when I was in the 6th grade. I had to write a persuasive essay
about the environment. I was taught about the structure of an essay, and he taught me about
thesis statements. I learned that a thesis will state your main idea for your paper and that the
remainder of the paper is proving or explaining that thesis. This is a skill that I have used every
single year since then.
In my senior year of high school I got my first experience of an English teacher that
really pushed me. Her no BS attitude so sharply contrasted with my lazy senior year-blow
everything off attitude that I began to dislike her very much. But even, as I was annoyed with
her, I could still see that she was really helping me. We had to write our college application
essays for that class, and she was with me every step of the way, constantly critiquing and
finding ways to make it better, requiring me to discover things about myself to write a better
essay. That class taught me about the value of writing, and I will always be grateful to Ms.
Brown.
The effect of associating school reading with a bad time followed me all the way through
high school, and I still do not read nearly as much as I used to. When it comes to novels, I read
about 1 a year. But I have noticed that I continue to read, just a different medium. I read a lot of
online articles. News stories, sports features, political turmoil, technology advances, world news;

I read it all. I am always thirsting for new information, and I want to know more and more about
the world around me. Im always thirsting for more reading, just like when I was younger, but
instead of adventure stories, I want information. I think this change will benefit me in the future,
as I want to go into marketing, and keeping up with the world around me will give me a better
sense of the market and of the world. And it all started with a bedtime story being read to a child.