B7. A. Learning to Read.

B7. A. Learning to Read.

While I don’t remember well the actual act of learning to read, I do remember that it was not much of a challenge for me when I started. I had a lot of time on my hands with my parents always working so I pretty much taught myself to read and write. I was reading proficiently by the time that my school decided to teach me to read and I remember being horribly bored because I wasn't really learning anything for quite a long time. This was a big source of tension in my classroom because I was kind of resentful that I could already read and there was no room for going on to harder things before everyone else. Things only got worse when they tried to teach me to write as well. I had taught myself remarkably flowing cursive (I’m still impressed with how good it was when I find an old box of school stuff) simply out of interest and then suddenly I was  forced to go back and learn to write in print. Sad to say, this pretty much destroyed the legibility of my handwriting though my spelling and sentence structure survived reasonably intact. I kept on reading for fun all the way through elementary before I started losing interest. I’m not sure why but my interest in reading for pleasure has really fluctuated year to year but i go through phases of non-stop reading followed by periods of reading only things i have to.