First Encounter with Books

Shaun Strickland
6/26/10
EDUC 526-905

I have to be honest upon looking at the prompt of this short reflection, I truly began to struggle. “My first experience with books,” “how am I supposed to remember that?” The following question will be a bit easier to answer as my memory was fairly well developed by my first positive and negative writing experiences. All of the above have had a tremendous impact on who I am today as a student and as a teacher. These experiences also have helped me to structure my practices in and out of the classroom, as I try to give these students the best and most recent information to better their classroom experience.
My earliest experience with books brings a couple of thoughts to mind. First book I always remember was a book called “Double Trouble.” The book was about twin raccoons that would get into all types of mischief. At the end of the book they were always forgiven and reminded that no matter how bad they think it is they will always be loved by their parents and by each other. The book has truly stuck into my mind as I in fact have a twin brother. Through our adventures and ups and downs we would get into all types of trouble but by the end of the day he and I were inseparable and our parents and have never loved us any less (even after our antics). It was somewhat inspirational as my mother was a single mom and my grandparents were our second set of parents. The book has always been a constant reminder of “accidents happen and that doesn’t make your family love you any less.”
As far as books that I remember reading for school purposes, most were things like “The Bearenstein Bears,” “Goosebumps,” and the ever popular Dr. Suess books. I think I read every “Goosebumps” book from cover to cover; it was perfect for grade school reading. These books were also perfect considering that there was a book report due just about every two weeks. Since the books were entertaining it made them easy to finish and needless to say the book reports were pretty entertaining. One book that stands out that was not really my selection but probably the earliest book I remember reading assigned to me by a teacher would be “Hatchet.” As I look back I must have read that book five or six times in one school year. I found the struggle of man vs. nature to be quite fascinating and pretty scary at the same time. Now that I come to think of it I did always enjoy reading and writing about these books but I don’t remember ever truly being taught “how to write.” It is somewhat disturbing as I think of this often and has really fueled my desire to become certified and teach English.
A positive experience I had with writing probably was not until I got to High School, mainly because all through grade school and even Junior High there was more reading than writing. It was my Freshman English class and I remember it well. The course was less reading and more writing as a matter of fact a lot of the writing we did was either prompted or creative writing. I enjoyed both and always liked to mix one in with the other. I enjoyed taking a prompt such as this one and turning it somehow into a “hero’s tale,” turning myself into an adventurer and I would overcome all obstacles in my way to be successful and finish the task. It was in this class I was first exposed to serious poetry, a topic that I have always enjoyed. The words of Dylan Thomas and “Do not go gentle” to this day still resonate within me. As I have gotten off topic this brings me back to my first positive experience. The assignment was to write an essay on what we enjoy doing the most, using the most basic parts of speech in proper format (nouns, pronouns, verbs, you get the picture). I decided to sit down and write this paper on what at the time was my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world; play Legend of Zelda and the Ocorina of Time on my Nintendo 64. This paper was something special, like the scene from A Christmas Story when young Ralphie writes his paper on the Red Rider BB Gun. I had never been more proud, I discussed the intense game play, the way I would use my hand eye coordination, and even went into as much depth as describing the colors of not just the controller but every button on it (red and green were not good enough for this paper, jade and ruby fit the paper so much better). Needless to say I had received an “A” on the paper and not only that but my teacher found it to be well constructed and thought out and submitted the paper to Nintendo. After doing so a few short weeks later she received a package and handed it to me in class. When I opened it up there was all types of goodies, autographed pictures from the game developers, accessories for my Nintendo, and what to me was the holy grail, that being an autographed copy of the game with the limited edition gold cartridge (impossible to find only a few hundred were made and distributed throughout the world). I was left speechless and that definitely goes down as my first positive memory when it comes to writing.
With every good story there is a bad story and it only seems fitting that this happened to me as a Post Graduate at The Hill School in Pottstown. I graduated from a public school in Delaware which I pretty much ran, star athlete, honors student, and life of the party. I chose to do a post grad year after U Penn contacted me about playing football, I didn’t meet their requirements with my current SAT scores so needed 10 more points to qualify. After visiting and meeting with the head coach Hill became my new home for my “13th year.” I entered Hill thinking I was well educated, I was assigned to courses I had not taken before (religion being one) and others being SAT prep courses. Along with those I believed I was this hot shot and talented writer so I added a writing course to my schedule. The teacher was one of my coaches and I loved him on the field, however he was completely different in the classroom. Our first writing assignment was handed to us a week into the school year, that’s right a week. I was not that bothered by the assignment just wanted a little more time to get acquainted with the course. Cocky and brash I attacked this paper; I wanted to show these people at Hill how writing was done.
However, shortly after I received my paper and I noticed the grade was “see me after class.” I continued to scroll through the pages and noticed my paper was shredded with red pen and harsh comments, some comments discussing things I’ve never even heard of; I mean no one discussed with me ever “noun/pronoun agreement.” I was nervous as I walked up to my teachers desk and listened to what he had to say, I remember this part very well as it was the first time I had ever been asked this question “did your teachers teach you to write in high school?” Of course I wanted to say yes right away but as I thought about it my high school experience did not involved teaching me how to write or proper format, as much as it was reading and vocabulary words. I began to discuss with him major issues and flaws in my writing and did not take them personally as the competitor in me knew it was only constructive criticism. The teacher allowed me to redo the paper in which I received a “B” and went on to learn how to write grade “A” papers. After college I returned to work at Hill and had a student of mine find that paper stuck to the inside of my old desk in my old dorm room. I showed that to the teacher as he still works at Hill and we both had a good laugh and agreed that I am much better off now than I was when I first wrote that awful paper. This was a negative experience because of the grade but turns out to be a positive lesson in my young life.
All of these experiences have made a huge impact on who I am today as a young educator. I make it a point to not just assign readings and look for content but truly teach students how to write. I have read enough papers where high school students in a private school tend to write how they talk, or even worse approach papers as if they are a text message and abbreviate everything. I have seen the impact of lazy teachers as students come to the 9th grade level unprepared to write an MLA paper because their teacher did not teach this or even introduce this at the 8th grade level. It just ends up being embarrassing and I have had “A” students receive “C’s and D’s” because they are unprepared for this assignment. I think it is terrible that technology has somewhat crippled our youth. Handwriting these days is awful because no one writes a rough draft and types the final copy it is all done via computer. Language and proper grammar have gone out the window thanks to AOL, TWITTER, and Text Messaging, sometimes when I read a paper I feel as if the student has written it on their cell phone. Finally, one of my biggest pet peeves that I cover immediately when introducing a paper is how to find a credible source and how to properly cite that source within the paper. It is astonishing how many students I had to fail due to “plagiarism” because they do not know how to properly cite information/a source, and even worse that they think everything they “Google” is credible. Not only do my students read and understand the material but they are assigned a paper at the end in which they will have to do a little research and write a proper paper. After seeing the struggles I have definitely made it a point to refresh and even reteach students how to write properly, but I also have made a point of collaborating with the 8th grade teacher so she can better prepare the students by teaching them how to write properly and for what they will have to do at the 9th grade level.