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. The other 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 was being read. 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. Sounds 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 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 had been 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.

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. The assignment had gone on for about a week and a half or so. We had read a chapter every night and the book was about ten chapters.  To start off the day, we would have our daily announcements; the Pledge of Allegiance, things going on in school, and 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. Some nights it would take longer to read, especially at the first few chapters, because I was still in the process of building my confidence up to read.

Tutoring with those 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. It was also my biggest challenge and a new process. I’ve read little pieces of books to my mom or dad before because I didn’t know what I was reading, but before the assignment I’ve never had to read a whole book to my whole family, by myself. Aside from this being new, it was nerve-wrecking. I was just reading a book, what was so hard about that? I’ll tell you what was hard about that; being a pretty bad reader and having people stare at you while you read is not easy. All eyes had been on me when I was reading, and that made me severely nervous because I knew they were actually paying attention to me. Everyone would know when I messed up or skipped something. This wasn’t like when I was reading silently. When I did that, I just made it look like I was reading, but now I couldn’t fake it, it was the real deal.

For most of the first half of the book, I felt the same, nervous and scared out of my mind. My thought process was if I couldn’t read to my family, I couldn’t read to anyone. Through the beginning, I had messed up a lot; I didn’t know how to pronounce words, I skipped words, I’d lose my place at the end of a line and accidentally start on another random line, I’d hesitate when I was about to read a sentence, I’d stumble over my words or mix them up, and it’d take me forever to finish a page never mind a chapter. I had felt like that for majority of the book, I didn’t feel much of a change until I had made it to the last few chapters of the book.

However, within the last few chapters of the book, I was able to read the pages and it would flow much easier than it did at the beginning. I stumbled over words less, and I wasn’t mixing words up or leaving out a word in the sentence. I also tried to pronounce words I didn’t know, instead of skipping them or looking to my parents to say the word for me. Aside from that, it became clear that I was reading faster than I had been. I could read an entire page just as fast as all the other kids could, and my reading level and skill was starting to match the other students.

Subsequently, I was actually able 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. 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. When I was able to read aloud to my class, or more importantly my family, I felt as though I could do just about anything. I was overly concerned about other’s opinions when I was reading or even outside of the classroom; but today, I’m able to do anything and everything I want because people’s opinions no longer have an impact on me. The only opinion that matters is my own, or unless it’s coming from a professor, I could always use a professor’s opinion.