Starting at a young age, I disliked any sort of reading, especially reading aloud. I wasn’t the most confident in myself, nor was I actually good at reading; I tended to stumble on my words, or not know how to pronounce bigger words like the other kids could. Aside from those issues, I was a pretty slow reader, kids were able to read pages faster than I could read half of one. In class, the nerves would kick in, I was extremely afraid of being called on when we were reading popcorn style; that’s when a student “popcorns” or calls on another student to read the next passage or page. Once my teachers started to catch onto how terrible of a reader I was, they actually placed me in special classes, two to be exact. One of them was a one-on-one tutoring session type of thing. I would go to this teachers very small classroom, it was more like a long office, and I would sit at the desk and read passages that she had given me. Along with reading, I would have to answer questions. That had been the worst part about it because I would either read fast to get it done and then not remember what I read, or I would take forever to read it so I can actually remember what I was reading; either way, I still messed up what I was reading. The other class was more group related at times. Sometimes a handful of us students would go up to this teacher’s classroom and we’d all read a passage together a few times. Once we read it together, we’d then read it by ourselves. Sound like an easy tutoring session, but it wasn’t; once we had finished reading it to ourselves a few times we had to read it to our teacher. My teacher would have her own copy, a timer, and a red pen. The timer was because each of us were given a couple minutes, the time changed on how long the passage was, and I would read either until I had finished or until the timer had gone off. As I was reading, she used her red pen to either mark words I had messed up or had missed. Once finished, we would go over what was in red, and we would count the markups; if there were a lot, I would do the same passage again to try and get a better score. Meeting with these teachers really set my confidence towards reading at a newer, higher level.

Tutoring with these teachers started my progress of becoming a more confident reader, but what really set it off was reading aloud to my family. My family has been and always will be my biggest critics, so reading aloud to them was a big hurdle for me. In elementary school, we had started off the year with a new principal. His first major thing to start off the year; give every student the same book and have them read it aloud to their parents every night. To start off the day, we would have our daily announcements, the Pledge of Allegiance, then to end the announcements my principal would tell us what chapter we had to read to our families that night. To me, this was more nerve-wrecking than reading aloud to my class. The book was a short little chapter book about an owl, I don’t remember the title or the author which isn’t very helpful. Subsequently, I was able to actually to not only have confidence in my reading, but I was able to read aloud to other students and not worry about students judging me for fumbling my words or not knowing how to properly pronounce a word. I went from being the student that never volunteered to read in class, to consistently being the first one to raise my hand to read aloud in class. At first I was still nervous because I’ve read in front of teachers or a couple of students before, but I had never read in front of a classroom full of students. But once I got started I struggled to stop, I was so happy and confident in myself that I no longer cared about what was going on around me.

I understand that this was just about reading, but it did actually have a larger impact on me than just my reading skills. In fact, I had a lot more confidence in myself in general. They have no connection, but for some reason when I was able to read aloud in class, I felt as though I could do just about everything and no longer cared about people’s opinions.