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Throughout my academic journey, any class that had us reading was always my favorite. I remember freshman year reading the Odyssey for the first time and it revived my obsession with Percy Jackson and then spiraled out into reading the original myths and plays. Then I would read something that got me interested in something else, and through these classes, I would learn and experience ideas I wouldn't have thought to look for. For me, English has been a class with such foundational ideas that I see them in so many other facets of my life. The teachers I've had over the years were teaching me to be a good reader and writer, but also they taught me media literacy. The whole point of English class is to learn how to efficiently understand ideas and experiences being conveyed through media. English has been by far my favorite subject.

I've always had a strange relationship with reading. I love to read but if you assign it, it's the most boring and tedious thing I've ever had to do. I've found that if I am forced to read for school chances are that I'll waste time trying to get through it and I won't process the information. This summer I read Sycthe by Neil Shusterman and I was absolutely obsessed with it and I finished it in three days, but I also read Atonement and that was an absolute slog to get through. You might be thinking maybe I can't read at a high level so I can't appreciate or have trouble understanding words with complicated language. Well, that's what I also thought but I proved myself wrong when I started reading Das Kapital: Volume I and loved it. I'm still trying to figure out what makes a book interesting to me and how I can overcome my distaste for a book. 

I often find that when reading I don't just learn new information I learn about how I respond to that information. My goal in taking this class was to expose myself to new ideas and learn new things, but also learn new things about myself. One of my favorite books of all time, Blackshirts and Reds by Micheal Parenti, does this amazingly. Parenti refocused my perspective as a white American and turned it into something grander and let me see further. I took this class because I want to experience that again, I want to have my worldview shifted by new ideas from literature and insight from both Mr. Davidson and my classmates. 

Comments

  1. Adussy ToadAugust 21, 2023 at 6:08 PM

    Omg yasss reading any book or just any article when it's assigned to me by a teacher is always so annoying and hard for me to do. But if it's an article or story I'm reading on my free time its actually enjoyable because it feels like I'm actually doing it just for me, and theres no pressure to memorize every little detail about the book for a test or quiz the next day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlexJDAugust 22, 2023 at 8:39 AM

    Alistair, I love how reading can spark you into diving down a rabbit hole for that topic. I also appreciate what you had to say about how reading has the possibility to change our thinking. This is so true. I read a book called The Overstory, and I learned so much about trees that I can never see them the same way after. I hope your journey of discovering what interests you about reading makes a lot of progress during this class as you continue to learn more about yourself and your preferences.

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