Good Student

788 Words2 Pages

Learning comes easier for some than for others. For me, thankfully, learning is unproblematic; there have been very few obstructions down my path of gaining knowledge. As a student, I sit in class, listening intently, and absorb the information. Why is that so? Why do some struggle more than others? Is it somehow connected to childhood?

As a youngster, I loved reading. I read books with the ferocity of a jungle cat, prowling the library and pouncing on books that struck my fancy. At Lincoln Trail Elementary, we had a program called Accelerated Reader, in which you would pick out a book from the library and be tested over it on the computer once you had finished reading. This became a favorite pastime of mine. I would test daily, sometimes multiple times daily, reading a book at school and then grabbing another to carry home and save for the following day.

My ravenous reading began before school, though. My mother tells me that once I learned how, I read everything I could get my tiny hands on. My personal favorites, though, were the books penned by the talented Dr. Seuss. His mastery of rhyming made me practically giddy, and I collected his books fanatically. My mother would sit and read them with me every night before bed.

But one night, I decided to read to her.

“Go on, pick a book to read,” my mother told me. I walked over to the little white shelves that housed my assortment of books. Scanning over the titles, I found my favorite one. I removed it from its other literary brethren and proceeded to walk back to the bed, where my mother lay. Next to my small bed, a nightstand held up my little white lamp, its bulb warmly lighting the room with a slightly yellow-tinted glow.

Upon seeing the book in my hands, my mother’...

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...ouldn’t exactly win, but it was a game nonetheless: I would yell out something to draw and then everyone would draw it. That simple.

I explained how to play to them and off we went.

“Draw a… cat!” I yelled, and we scribbled in our notebooks. Mine came out looking like a misshapen potato, and Mom’s looked like a passable cat, but my uncle’s was the best I had ever seen.

No matter what I called out—be it a pterodactyl, or a bicycle, or Godzilla—and no matter how hard I tried to match my uncle’s artistic prowess, the pencil in my seven-year-old hands couldn’t create such fine works of art as his.

So, I kept drawing.

I guess little moments like these have fueled my passion for just wanting to pick up a pencil and write (and draw) and read until my eyes give out. Being exposed to these things so early as a child set me up for an easier time in school than most.

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