I love reading, really I do. I always have and I still do. But I hate school and classes and the overwhelming amount of work that the higher education system entails. Because of this, I don’t have time to read anymore, though at times I really wish I could. It is a sad story really. Some of my favorite books are the Harry Potter books and the Twilight books. I read both of these series over and over again. I also read all 150 of the Nancy Drew books over and over and over again. Those books were and are my favorites. I absolutely loved any mystery type book. Every year i would ask for 5 different Nancy Drew books for Christmas. I have all of the novels from the first in the series to the 50th. (Maybe after college I can continue to build my collection). Sometimes I could imagine myself as a detective, because once you read enough Nancy Drew books, you can almost see how the ending is going to play out before you even get there. You learn all the detective and sleuthing tricks and before you know it, you're solving the crime before Nancy did! I was an avid detective and avid reader all through my childhood and I wish I could say I still am today. However my $25,000 tuition bill comes along with $25,000 of boring school work that takes up all my time, leaving very little time to leisure reading.
During my elementary school years, I started reading more vigorously because of the program my school had called accelerated reader. This program designated hundreds of books in our library as ‘accelerated reader books.’ Depending on the difficulty of these books, they were worth a certain amount of points. For every one you read, you would take a comprehension test and based on your performance you would earn those points and move up the ladder. They gave us rewards in point increments (i.e, if you got 20 points you got a cool pencil, 30 points you got a piece of candy, 40 points you got a homework pass, etc. Once you got to the big points you would have rewards like missing class time to have a movie day with popcorn, having lunch with the principal, a toys r us gift card, and big things like that.) I was a student who loved reading before this contest came about. When this contest started, it changed my view of reading. It conditioned me to not read books unless there was a point value associated with them. I remember specifically reading the novel, “Anne of Green Gables.” This story was the epitome of boring. I would have rather watched paint dry than read this book - and I loved reading! Why was I reading this dry and boring book? Well, it was worth a ton of points and I wanted that Toys R Us gift card, so I powered through the boring book to get a reward and to beat my peers. I didn’t challenge myself with my reads because I wanted to pass the test for points. It killed the budding reader and writer inside of me and turned me into a crazed competitor and test taker. Reading was simply a race to the most points.
I used to love to write, I would constantly be writing stories. Some of my favorite topics would be horses and the love between them and their humans. (I never ever had a horse or was a horseback rider, I only rode one probaby once at my town carnival so I have no idea why I wrote so many stories about this.) In fifth grade, my teacher was a huge geography nut. Each month we would learn about a specific region of the world and we would have to memorize all of the countries in that region. Every day we would come in and get a blank map and would have to fill it out to the best of our memory. At the end of the month we would be graded on how many we remembered. Not to toot my own horn, but I was a freaking awesome geographer. To this day, you can put a blank map in front of me and I can go into beast mode filling in every country. But that's not all the class entailed.
What went along with this was a long paper on one of the countries in the region. For example, when we were focusing on Europe, we had a choice to write about Leichtenstein, Luxembourg, or Monaco. We had to have a beautiful cover page and we would have to just spit out information about the country in the paper. As someone who loved writing, this was boring as watching paint dry. I didn’t want to write about stupid facts that anyone can look up online - I wanted to write about my own thoughts and opinions that no one else knew about. I felt like I was turned into a writing robot. Therefore my awesome 5th grade teacher who I still love effectively killed my love for writing.
My first digital experience was a giant dinosaur computer. The first game that I played was a Madeleine game. You remember Madeleine, the little french girl in those books we all loved. The game came in the form of a cd that had to be inserted into the computer. In there you could do things like pretend to cook, you could do puzzles, play memory games, wash her dog, etc. Another game I had was a Dora game. There was a bunch of different games I loved to play with Dora too. Here there was a game that was like a race, you had to match up the shapes and the colors while running through a tunnel and you had to do a certain amount before you got to the end of a tunnel and moved on to the next level (and tunnel). My other favorite was a Lion King game. That was more artsy and I could draw and race and all that fun stuff.
I was not allowed to get a cell phone even though everyone had one. I didn’t get one until I was 12. Everyone else got theirs light years before I did. It was one of the worst feelings ever. I also wasn’t allowed to have any social media account. This was just not acceptable to me and I was forced to rebel. I made my own facebook account and made it a fake name so my own hypocritical parents couldn’t find it (they both had facebooks but I couldn’t have one - stupid).
I hid it for about a year when my parents found out about it and deactivated it. I of course reactivated it because I would not be caged. After this reoccuring 4 or 5 times, they finally realized that they were being ridiculous and stopped caring. I shed many a tear over being an outcast throughout middle and high school because of my lack of technology or digital involvement. Even when I did have a phone, it was about 6 years behind on the newest technology so I was still left out. I couldn’t use instagram or snapchat or play my friends in candy crush because I had a shitty phone. I felt imprisoned by my crappy technology. Sad story, am I right?
I think this shaped my view of technology as a whole. I had this unexplained animosity towards it. When I was a senior in high school, my school decided to do away with paper and pencil and use technology for everything - textbooks, taking notes, assignment submissions, everything. They gave every student their own iPad. Most people thought that it was a Godsend. I hated that thing to high hell.
After 11 years of learning traditionally, I was being forced to re-learn how to learn. What the hell is that all about? I boycotted the iPad, never charging or taking it anywhere. Why would I - a young and technologically savvy student resist a technological advancement so insistently? Why do I hate feeling out of my comfort zone as far as using new tools and applications? I feel it has something to do with the lack of technology in my life growing up. As a teacher, digital literacy will be included in my curriculum to make my students digital lives easier than mine was.