Going the Distance

It is just over six months since I started this project.  I am trying, on another venue, to work on my memoir AND to rewrite a seven hundred page journal into something that can be used as a book.  That journal was written when I lived in China and taught Western Culture and idiomatic English to scholars who were preparing to study overseas.  Both of these projects are a big and long row to hoe (a farm idiom).

I only started writing about two years ago.  I am an old woman and writing never came easily for me.  I can remember in high school English having to write a 200 word paragraph describing something.  I managed about two sentences and then I was lost. In college, the research paper on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a totally incomprehensible dialog.

I didn’t discover, cognitively, until I was a couple of years out of college, that I had a reading disability.  I couldn’t get it the first time I read it, or the second, and sometimes, not even on the third time through. I just couldn’t understand what the words on the page meant.

Maybe it was because my family moved many times in primary school.  I am unsure as I was really a good reader in first grade, but things went downhill from there and three moves in second and another in third didn’t help my reading skills.  It also wreaked havoc with math too.

By sixth grade, my teacher told my parents I was lazy.  I tested high but could not perform.  Didn’t anyone realize I had a problem?  Parents, be aware of your children’s progress in school.  Illness, hearing difficulties, eyesight problems, moving, and more can cause problems with learning.  If your child did well and then suddenly has problems, maybe there is an underlying cause.  Try to find out what it is.  Primary school children are building the formative basis for their studies throughout their lives.  I think if my parents had paid attention, they would have found I wasn’t lazy, but had lost the continuity of learning in so many moves from school to school and from teacher to teacher, all with different approaches to teaching.  Just the trauma of changing schools and being with new children so often, having to fit in, can interfere with learning.

When I was an adult and out on my own, I could little afford much in the way of entertainment.  Going to a library and getting books was not a high priority as I hated reading, but, having little money, I needed something to occupy my mind in the quiet times commuting on the bus, and in the evenings without television.  Books that were light and comic were my choice.  I soon discovered that my problem was being unable to read.  I worked very hard at remedying that problem.  After five years of reading as much as I could, I finally learned to read efficiently.  I went from droll humor like The Egg and I to reading texts such as Introduction to Geology and understanding it the FIRST time through.

Reading is a big part of my life now.  We do not have television and night comes at about 4:30 in the afternoon on a winter’s day in my part of the country.  Reading happens every day.  Sometimes just for a short while when I sit in the sun (if it decides to be present), or for several hours by the fireside on a cold, blustery winter’s night.

Now, here I am, a person who was almost illiterate, writing, writing about my life.  What a change from the sixth grader whom the teacher said was lazy, the college student who needed to read the collateral reading three times to get it.  Now I can enjoy the written word.  Too bad someone didn’t notice earlier.  School would have been a lot easier and more pleasurable.

 

Postscript:  As an undergraduate in college, my grades outside my major were mediocre.  When I went back to grad school, after I had learned to read, I was a straight A student. Too bad it came so late.

It is just over six months since I started this project.  I am trying, on another venue, to work on my memoir AND to rewrite a seven hundred page journal into something that can be used as a book.  The journal was written when I lived in China and taught Western Culture and idiomatic English to scholars who were preparing to study overseas.  Both of these projects are a big and long row to hoe (a farm idiom).

I only started writing about two years ago.  I am an old woman and writing never came easily for me.  I can remember in high school English having to write a 200 word paragraph describing something.  I managed about two sentences and then I was lost. In college, the research paper on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a totally incomprehensible dialog.

I didn’t discover, cognitively, until I was a couple of years out of college, that I had a reading disability.  I couldn’t get it the first time I read it, or the second, and sometimes, not even on the third time through. I just couldn’t understand what the words on the page meant.

Maybe it was because my family moved many times in primary school.  I am unsure as I was really a good reader in first grade, but things went downhill from there and three moves in second and another in third didn’t help my reading skills.  It also wreaked havoc with math too.

By sixth grade, my teacher told my parents I was lazy.  I tested high but could not perform.  Didn’t anyone realize I had a problem?  Parents, be aware of your children’s progress in school.  Illness, hearing difficulties, eyesight problems, moving, and more can cause problems with learning.  If your child did well and then suddenly has problems, maybe there is an underlying cause.  Try to find out what it is.  Primary school children are building the formative basis for their studies throughout their lives.  I think if my parents had paid attention, they would have found I wasn’t lazy, but had lost the continuity of learning in so many moves from school to school and from teacher to teacher, all with different approaches to teaching.  Just the trauma of changing schools and being with new children so often, having to fit in, can interfere with learning.

When I was an adult and out on my own, I could little afford much in the way of entertainment.  Going to a library and getting books was not a high priority as I hated reading, but, having little money, I needed something to occupy my mind in the quiet times commuting on the bus, and in the evenings without television.  Books that were light and comic were my choice.  I soon discovered that my problem was being unable to read.  I worked very hard at remedying that problem.  After five years of reading as much as I could, I finally learned to read efficiently.  I went from droll humor like The Egg and I to reading texts such as Introduction to Geology and understanding it the FIRST time through.

Reading is a big part of my life now.  We do not have television and night comes at about 4:30 in the afternoon on a winter’s day in my part of the country.  Reading happens every day.  Sometimes just for a short while when I sit in the sun (if it decides to be present), or for several hours by the fireside on a cold, blustery winter’s night.

Now, here I am, a person who was almost illiterate, writing, writing about my life.  What a change from the sixth grader whom the teacher said was lazy, the college student who needed to read the collateral reading three times to get it.  Now I can enjoy the written word.  Too bad someone didn’t notice earlier.  School would have been a lot easier and more pleasurable.

 

Postscript:  As an undergraduate in college, my grades outside my major were mediocre.  When I went back to grad school, after I had learned to read, I was a straight A student. Too bad it came so late.