Gabrielle Cervantes

English101

Between the Lingering Presence of Literacy’s Conservative History and its Pressure for Change

 

Hating reading always came naturally to me. I didn’t like numbers, reading was hard but letters made words and words were the worst thing in existence to me when I was 4. When I was in preschool, our teacher practiced them often, encouraging my fellow students to write perfect letters on wide lines, sound out words with each syllable. She was always encouraging the class, exclaiming how well we were all doing. Until she came to me. It was subtle but I noticed and unfortunately, so did my classmates. When my teacher called on me to read I stood like everyone else, wishing I could just sink into the floor. With my mouth dry and my hands shaking, I stuttered through a couple words. When she encouraged me to sound them out, I said the wrong vowels. After a couple minutes of this, her face would settle in a neutral expression and she would tell me to sit and see her after class.  

Watching the lights shine dimly off the worn linoleum, I sat waiting for my mother as she spoke with the teachers she was paying to teach me and discuss my future. My mother’s face was worn down after a long day of working but she always managed to smile at me when she walked out of the office, saying we could finally go. But as we rode home in our old car, I had questions boiling under my skin. I would ask her if there was something wrong with me. Why did the teachers treat me differently than the other kids? Why did they stop calling on me and move me to the back of the class? Why were all the other kids treating me differently?

I know she always had an answered but for the life of me, I can’t remember what she said. Everyday it was something knew; the children in my class snickering as I stumbled over syllables; Being sent to the corner for acting out because I didn’t know what a page from a book said; an older student snapping shut the book I was reading out loud to him and requesting a different partner who was able to read.

I hated reading. The words would swim before my eyes, never letting me know what they said or what they meant. I didn’t understand and after a while, I didn’t want to understand.  Writing was an obstacle I also abhorred because everything I wrote was wrong, or backwards, or upside down. Most times it was a combination of the three. But my mother never gave up. Every night she had my brother and me close our eyes and she would read to us. The Boxcar Children, Magic Tree House, The Mouse and The Motorcycle, Amelia Bedelia and The Chronicles of Narnia – all books that inspired me. They were worlds that I had never thought of before and there was nothing that I wanted more then to spend more time in them.  I wanted to disappear into the worlds where there was a clear path, a clear resolution to everyone involved and where everyone knew what they were destined to be. But when I opened my eyes to read the pages of the worlds that I loved, the words would slide and I was left feeling more lost than before, trapped in a world I wanted nothing to do with.

My mother transferred both me and my brother to a different school when I entered Kindergarten. With new people to meet and a new teacher to impress, I was ecstatic. Our new teacher, Mrs Finrow gave us our first worksheet to complete she said take as long as you like. My whole body shook and I quickly grabbed a worksheet. This was the time to make things right- I wasn’t going to screw up this time. I stayed in during recess, pouring over the page before me, painstakingly marking and remarking every answer to be perfect. This was my time- I wanted to badly to impress her and show her how smart I was. It was going to be different this time.

When I was finished and everyone had come in from recess, I ran over to Mrs Finrow and thrusted my paper into her hands, making her laugh. But the laughter soon faded and slowly her smile slipped from her lips. She looked at me, then back at the paper. She requested that I stay behind after class that day and called my mother a few minutes later. So I sat in another hallway, in another school, waiting.

This time I was close enough to the door to hear them discussing me. It was the first time I heard the word dyslexia but from the way my mother acted, this word was nothing new. She just nodded and took me home. That night we read about The Horse and His Boy and I had never wished so hard to sink into another world. It was a new place for me, with new people and a new teacher but it had changed nothing.

Kindergarten progressed roughly and frustrating slow. I hated it. I hated reading. I hated school. And when first grade rolled around, I was not expecting that to change. But then I met Mrs Good. She was a stern women with white hair and only a few inches taller than us six year olds. She had taught my brother before she taught me and knew my mother well. Every single day, she had the class read a passage from our textbook out loud and every single day, she called on me. Students she called on were expected to read the entirety of the page- most of them had pictures but some of the pages just had words. The first week was the hardest. I would stumble over words that other kids easily knew, I would make mistakes and she would correct me and make me go back and reread it again. But she never allowed the other kids to laugh at me and every day she would call on me, no matter how badly I had done the day before.

I loved it. She never judged me when I did poorly, she was never harsh and she always rewarded the class after we were done reading. I slowly worked up the courage to ask her if I could borrow the textbook from the class. I wanted to read more, I wanted to know more of what happened in the story. Normally the school expressly forbade any student from taking textbooks home but Mrs Good simply slid it into my bag with a wink.

My mother was working two jobs so she rarely read to us anymore and I barely saw her. We only had old books because money was always tight and buying new ones didn’t fit in with making rent some months. That one textbook changed everything. I remember it being bigger than anything I had carried before- filled to the brim with new, unopened worlds I could discover and dive into.

For weeks I poured over the textbook and bringing it to and from class every day. I would wake my mom up when she was taking a nap between shifts, climbing into her bed and proclaiming that I would read her to sleep. She just laughed and helped me through some stories until she fell asleep again. I shared the book with my brother but he had already read all the stories and brushed me off. At night when mom had time to read with us, I could tell that he was listening to me read those stories again- listening to the familiar cadence he had heard not long before when he had been in the same class.  

Mrs Good never gave up on encouraging me. Everyday she would call on me to read and everyday, I would search the pages before me for something. Until the day when everything changed. The whole class was reading Frog and Toad Together, and one by one my classmates stood and fell, a melody forming between us. As I stood I looked over the page and finally, finally knew the answer.

Every word had a purpose, every comma and period a song. I landed each beat with perfectly, not stumbling over long words, not sounding out difficult ones- everything worked as a smooth cohesive whole and I knew every melody.

When I finished I looked up at Mrs. Good and she didn’t say anything but she gave me a small nod and called on the next kid. After class she took me aside and congratulated me, giving me a Pokemon card she had found as a reward for reading so well. That night I went home and I carefully set it on the window seal in the room I shared with my cousin. It was a holographic card but that mattered little to me. I had done what I had never had done before and I had something to show for it.  

Learning to love reading wasn’t a hard task. After so many years of frustration and being cut off from the thing that I loved, reading felt like power. I had the power to finally connect with texts, finally dive into the worlds that had been barred from me. I had power and I took advantage of it. After the first grade I dove into reading with a new abandon, devouring every book I could lay my hands on, so much so that I got in trouble with my fourth grade teacher for spending too much time in the library. By the time I was in fifth grade I was a library assistant reading at college level, more than set on the career path of becoming an author.

At the end of the day, I simply need someone to support me but I also needed to find the reason to want to improve myself. I have multiple people to thank for encouraging me to continuing to better myself and supporting me despite the frustrations and difficulties. Having something affect you for years is not something you can shake easily but with the right people backing you, you can find yourself capable of doing anything.