Over the years my opinions on reading has fluctuated immensely. Reading silently or in my head and other ela has always been one of my “gifts” (along with mathematics). Starting when I was in elementary school I was put into kindergarten at an early age. My parents and the administration thought I should be with those kids instead. This happened to me and 5 other kids that year. We were always pulled out of class to do extra reading and math activities and I didn’t really know why we couldn’t do them with the other kids, later I would find out it was to further teach us at our learning paces. However I didn’t understand why I was learning ahead of the others because for years I had gone to speech therapy. Learning and reading had always been talents but when it came to reading out loud I just couldn’t. Still years later now I still have issues with reading out loud due to my speech issues. At East Palestine elementary we had this thing called SFA which stood for Success For All. The school system believed that reading was the most important out of all the subjects and wanted all the kids to really have a chance to be good at it. It was a 80 minute class every morning focused around reading and writing. At the end of every nine weeks we had to do a project on the book we read and write about it. For homework every night we had to do what they called Read and Response (or R&R for short). I cannot physically explain how much I hated doing that along with the book club projects. We had to read for 25 minutes every night and write 4-6 sentences about it and have our parents sign it and it was just truly awful. After about 2 years of that every night trust me you get really fed up quickly. I didn’t know a single kid who enjoyed it. Even my brothers! That one class made me hate reading and writing for years after. However looking back at it now, I’m glad I had that experience because I do really think it helped me become a better reader and it did open me up to a lot of books I enjoyed that I wouldn’t have thought about reading such as the Gregor the Overlander series we read in that class. Along with that it was nice to be put in a class with kids at my reading level or close to for a little over an hour every day. The summer going into 8th grade is when I really started looking into reading for fun again. I started by looking for books in series I had liked when I was younger or books about interesting topics and slowly I had gotten back into it. I still read for fun quite often. Books such as Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman and Too Much Is Not Enough by Andrew Rannells I still find myself coming back to from time to time. However when it comes to reading in school or for classes I still find myself trying to force myself to enjoy it even if it’s a good book. It’s almost like a little Language Arts ptsd. Over the last couple of years reading and writing has gotten me through a lot and through this year I’m going to be able to learn and build off of that. So all in all as of now I don’t think my relationship with reading is anything negative however it might not be the most positive relationship I could have.