On a practical level, being able to read and write make my life so much easier. I read store names and street signs when I am driving and I can write grocery lists for myself to remember all the items I need to buy or write a to-do list. I value my skill of being able to read and write on an intellectual level because I can gain so much knowledge by reading and writing. Because I can read, I can read the news online or in the paper, read textbooks, and read to gain new ideas. Because I can write, I can share my intellectual ideas with an audience. Finally, I value my skills of being able to read and write on a personal level. I can write to express creative ideas, or write to open up about a personal issue I have been working though in my brain. Because of my skills I can read books that spark an interest and open my eyes to a different world I could have never thought of on my own. I learned to value these skills by writing in a journal daily, and reflecting on how different my life would be if I did not have the skills to read or …show more content…
The special education teachers needed to assess how my progress was, so they would pull me out of class two or three times a year to test me and score my results. The teacher told me to read a passage out loud to her. As per usual for me, I stuttered all the way through the passage, feeling embarrassed and hot in the face. My teacher then asked me questions about the passage, and I could not remember half the answers to the questions and I responded ‘I do not know’. Then my teacher asked me to read a new passage in my head. After I had finished, my teacher asked questions about the text. I could remember a fair amount of the answers, but the questions that I did not remember; I went back and looked in the text to find. My teacher told me she noticed two striking differences about how I answered the questions for each passage. In passage one, I did not remember as much and did not use the texts as a resource, but in passage two I remembered more clear details and used the text to answer the questions. This realization was both interesting to me and upsetting. I was upset and felt constrained by my ability to read aloud. When I remember being terrified as a thirteen year old that I would always be terrible at reading aloud, and that one day when I had children, I was not going to be able to read to them. I felt constrained