My Wonder Years: Attitudes toward Reading and Writing through the Years

     From a very young age I was taught to read and write.  When I was eight months old my parents bought my first set of New Standard Encyclopedias, Legendary Classics, The Complete Works of Programmed Classics, and a set of children’s books by Child Horizons.  Every book that I was given as a child I have to this day.  In first grade I was placed in an advanced reading level.   By the time I started third grade I had published three short books through the Third Grade Publishing Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I loved reading and writing and was proud to say it!  In fourth grade I wrote my first book of poems titled, Poems Poems Poems!  My favorite writer at that time was Shel Silverstein.  I had several journals and diaries kept under lock and key until sometime in middle school.  Once adolescence hit, my passion for reading and writing vanished.  I quit all of it unless it was required of me.  My attitude toward reading and writing was not necessarily negative, it simply was non-existent. 

     While in college I read and wrote enough to get by with average grades.  I am convinced my interests in a social life took precedence above and beyond anything else.  It was not until I graduated from college and took a job as a flight attendant that I started reading again.  For one year I traveled the world and read in my off time.  My next job would place me in a residential therapeutic wilderness camp in Florida working with “at-risk” teens.  I started journaling at night to express my feelings of frustration, sadness, and finally love! I met my husband who was also a camp-counselor.  For two years we communicated by letters written daily to one another.  I now have every letter written between us bound in a book.  Now, as a graduate student, my attitude of reading and writing is one of intrinsic motivation.  I am more driven by the learning process of reading and writing than ever before.  While I would never replace my experiences in between my love of reading and writing, I will give way to the old cliché, If I only knew then what I know now.  Now I have a matured love of reading and writing, and view it as a way of life. 

My first set of books.