Michael Foreman
Jones/1110
August 31, 2015
Love and Hate
I can remember reading books and writing as far back as 1st and 2nd grade. I instantly fell in love with reading from the first book that we read. Reading all those cheesy books about monsters and such just had me hooked. All the way through elementary school I was always in the library checking out new books just to take them home and just spend the rest of my afternoon in my room reading. Reading just got my mind off of everything in the world and just opened up my imagination to explore. We didn’t really write too much in elementary school except every once in a time we would have to write stories about ourselves. I was pretty good at it back then considering my grandma helped me with 90% of the story itself. My love for both reading and writing changed really quickly once I hit middle school.
When I got to middle school, my hate for reading and writing just sky rocketed through the roof. It wasn’t so much that it was hard I just believe I made it a lot harder than what it was. We started doing essay after essay and book after book. All the essay topics were too boring and just completely cut my whole motivation to a minimum. When I would get the chance to do all my research and type my essay I was rolling along smooth as ever. I’d bring it in on the turn in date and hand it in as confident as anyone could ever be. I thought for sure I was getting an A on every single one of them because of all the work I had put into it, it had to be good. Sure enough, my English teacher hands back our essay a few days later, she sets mine down on my desk face down. I knew right away it was a bad grade just by the way my teacher looked at me and set it on my desk. I turned it over hoping for a miracle that I got a good grade, BAM, a big fat F. My eyes just bug eyed because I didn’t know that it could’ve been that bad. As I’m looking through the pages looking at her notes, just made me more and more depressed because of my grade. Ever since that essay I haven’t had the same love for writing. Now don’t get me wrong I still loved reading. All through 6th grade the books were good and I passed all the tests so we were “A okay” for that year. But the rest of middle school the books were just so boring. None of them interested me what so ever. I always have been the type of person that will love something if it’s in my interest but if it isn’t then I don’t like it. Considering that all the topics on these books were awful so they didn’t interest me. That’s when my hate for reading started to develop. Once I got to high school, it grew even bigger.
In high school, it was only going to be harder and worse. Very first day of class my English teacher assigned us an essay. I thought instantly right there “wow here we go again”. Went home, did all my research and made my rough draft. I thought doing a rough draft and letting the teacher look over it would help a lot this time. My English teacher checked it and didn’t really fix much so I thought I was good to go. I went home fixed my mistakes I made and the next day handed in the actual copy. Once again, very confident and happy that this essay is about to be an A. It took her a little bit to grade them, about a week, so I forgot about how nervous for the grade I was getting. I come into class one day with my paper already on my desk. I get there, flip it open, and start to look at it all. I’m just sitting there thinking to myself “what could I possibly be doing wrong?” Another awful grade and I was fed up with trying so hard on all these essays and not getting anything good back from it. My reading didn’t get any better either. The topics just seemed like they stayed the same with every single book that we read. None of them being interesting to me at all so I always hated reading them. Which made it even worse because some days I wouldn’t even read at all from lack of motivation with all the crappy books. With all this mess with my writing and my reading, I still managed to pass through every class. Look where I’m at now.