teacher+as+reader+2+(bartley)

Teacher as Reader- Ashley Bartley //What Makes a Good Writer?//

Growing up, I always considered myself a “good” reader. I could read faster than my peers, I read a lot, and I could ace any reading quiz given to me. I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and this fact along with my “good” reading skills allowed me to get good grades effortlessly in my high school English classes. At my school, especially early in our English education, teachers didn’t really focus a lot on analysis. We would read something, talk briefly about the plot, and then go on to do some kind of pretty worthless project about it. While this was good for my GPA, it didn’t do much for developing me as a reader or a writer. My teachers never tried to incorporate contemporary literature into the classroom, so feel like I wasn’t given proper exposure and tools to find new genres and authors that I liked. My way of selecting books involved walking through either Borders or the library and seeing whichbooks (usually new books) had a colorful, eye-catching cover, and involved a girl who was roughly my age and some boy who would break her heart and then woo her all over again.

Then, I entered AP Composition when I was in 12th grade. It was made very clear from day one that we were not in literature-Kansas anymore. This class, our teacher assured us, would be run like a college-level literature class, and we were expected to act and prepare for class like college students.

At first, I wasn’t afraid. I thought that this class, like all the others would be a piece of cake. However, after our first reading assignment, I found out that I was wrong. I had read the small article in the class period before, and I hadn’t underlined anything or really thought about what I was reading. When I got to class, the teacher began asking questions about analyzing the text. I stared dumbfounded. Where were these questions coming from? How were my peers getting these answers? Why the heck couldn’t a door knob just be a door knob? For the rest of the semester, I had to work hard to read and actually //think// about what I had read. I realized that this was something that my so-called “good” reading skills lacked-analysis. I think that this is an essential quality to have to be considered a “good” reader. After my experience in AP Comp, I realized that while the number of books that I had read was very high, the number that I could actually remember was very low. Because I didn’t really take the time to think about what I had read, what was happening, and how it related to my life, I hadn’t really mastered the book. Good readers don’t just read something and then discard it, they take it with them and allow the readings to shape their experience in life.

Another important quality of being a good reader is to experiment with what you read. It’s very easy to read one book that you like and just read only books like that. However, this does not allow for growth or dynamic experience through reading. For example, when I was in high school, I found out that I liked a particular author named Sarah Dessen. While Dessen’s books are fantastic reads and, as semi-untypical of the YA/Chick Lit genre, actually have some kind of value and worth to them in the lessons that they allow readers to learn, there was a span of time where I only read books by her and other writers that I found via Googling “AUTHORS LIKE SARAH DESSEN.” I didn’t really grow in any way because I was just continuing to read the same thing over and over. Eventually, mostly with the help of my AP Comp teacher, I began to branch out. I discovered writers like Sandra Cisneros that greatly influenced me as a person and a writer.