Jonathan Blankenship
J. Joy
Writing 102
1/26/16
The way I have learned about my reading, writing, and composing started when I was
young. Everyone I knew did their ABCs around the kindergarten and first grade. At the time I
thought it was mundane. I always enjoy things that came after the “write the letter S in cursive
500 times” such as recess, and break time. The best part about the experience was that I had
educators were amazing, but of course at the time I didn’t think that way about the situation. My
class was the trouble maker class as some people might have called, the type of kids that would
bolt from the instructors, hit people, bite teachers, etc. A memorable time was in 2nd grade where
I started spelling and remembering my address. It was memorable because of two reasons. The
first reason is it was the first time I was out of the trouble maker class and in a normal classroom.
The second reason is it was the first time learning to spell words and remembering my address.
Spelling words was a simple task done by repetition, usually done by writing the word out 5
time. Remembering my address seemed like an impossible task I felt overwhelmed and scared
that the other classmates would make fun of me for not know my own address, but I kept
working at and started to remember it the same way I did the spelling.
In the 4th grade I had to switch schools because I was in trouble for biting kids that teased
me. What I thought was the worst thing in the world turned out to be a blessing in disguise
because I could reimage the way people saw me. It was like a redo on the last 3 grades. I would
show the class what I knew, instead of the ugly beast inside me. They were shocked and scared
one day when I lunged at a fellow student. Around that time I was introduced to the book
“Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events” and loved reading time. We would all gathered
around a semicircle table and took turns reading with the tutor reading the bulk of the material.
Personally I think it was because we didn’t have well develop speech. When we talked it
sounded like we had marbles in our mouths. After finishing the book we got a chance to watch
the movie and was really disappointed to see that the movie was only a minuscule fraction of the
book.
Fast forward to high school where everything was ramped up in difficulty. My love for
reading and writing dimensioned slightly, however I really enjoyed the things we read like The
Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies. I never liked the writing parts as much as I liked the reading
sections that I had in my classes. I think this is partly due to the fact that I thought I was a bad
writer, and because I lack motivation because I really did not care about the subjects we were
writing about.
Now in the year 2015 where writing was require I thought that I would hate it, but in
truth I really enjoyed it because the stuff was what I wanted to write about for the most part. A
paper I enjoyed last semester was called “This I Believe” which could have been anything you
believe. Another paper I did was a research paper that I liked but I made it way more difficult
than it needed to be because of my subject. Overall I had a rocky start in beginning of my school
years to say the least, but as time progressed I enjoyed reading and writing more and more to the
point I am confident in my abilities to do papers that make my professors ecstatic when reading
said assignments.