Paper Revision

Brett Babigian

Mrs. Fleischer

English 1A Sec 5

February 16, 2014

My Experiences with Reading and Writing

            My name is Brett Babigian; I grew up in Elk Grove, California and attended Franklin High School, a public high school with my graduating class topping 650 students. Throughout my time there, I became interested in engineering through their STEM program. I’m currently going to college to obtain a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering because I like to work with my hands and build stuff. I’ve always had a lot of experience with technology since I have had computer classes since first grade and my dad is a computer technician.  I have always been interested and good at math and science, but when it comes to writing and English classes I have always struggled.  Throughout my life my literacy has been shaped by various experiences from my schooling including phonics, reading competitions, and finding a novel of my liking, and will continue to play a huge role in my life after college.

            In elementary school, I first began to improve my literacy when I would go to my grandparent’s house and play phonics with my grandfather.  My grandfather was an English teacher and loved helping me with my homework.  He always corrected my spelling and grammar mistakes that I would write and say.  He would also use phonics, which is a method to teach reading and pronounce certain words and sounds.  Since he used this method to teach me about the English language I tended to have better reading comprehension than most other kids in my class during elementary school.

            When I was in the fifth grade my teacher came up with a plan with another teacher to have a reading competition between classes in order to get us to read more often.  My teacher announced to our class that the goal of the competition was to see which class could read the most pages in a month.  To be sure that we actually read the book that we said we did, we had to write a summary of what we read and turn it in with the page amount. The teachers would check it before adding the page count to our tally.  As I read all the books I could to conquer the most pages possible I began realizing a distinction in different types of books-there are some books that I actually enjoyed reading and then there are others that put me to sleep when I read them.  When the last days of the competition came to a close, the teachers announced the winner and my class won the pizza party.  Our teachers then explained to us that both of our classes would be getting a pizza party because the whole point of the competition was to get us to read every day in order to increase our reading comprehension and speed.  The books I read throughout the competition varied, but one series I read stood out.   In fifth grade the series called “Guardians of Gahoole” caught my attention.  It was a fantasy novel that had fifteen books in the series and was about an owl named Soren who is captured by an evil cult named The Pure Ones.  He escapes and leads a band of owls to a great tree called Gahoole where a all refugees go to.  The Pure Ones and the people of Gahoole have a war to determine whether evil or good will rule the world.  I eventually ended up buying and finishing the rest of the books in this series because I enjoyed it so much. 

            Later in my academic career, my freshman year English teacher had everyone in the class choose a choice novel to read and write a report on.  She told us only to pick the book if we found it interesting.  My teacher helped us find a novel of our liking by having us complete a series of assignments that pointed out our interests in book whether it be fiction, folk-tale, mystery, or any other genre.  I chose to read the book “The Hobbit,” by JRR Tolkien because I had already seen the earlier Lord of the Rings movies and thought they were interesting and figured I would give reading one of the books a chance.  The moment I started reading the book, I was intrigued by its unique storyline and how the characters and story connected back to the later movies I had already seen. This assignment opened my eyes to a collection of books I loved, and after I finished “The Hobbit,” I decided to read the other books of the trilogy as well.  Before my English class freshman year, I hated books and reading them because I was always forced to read some boring literature that I had no interest in just because the teachers assigned them.  In this class I was finally able to choose a book to write a report on and I realized that maybe reading wasn’t as bad as I always thought it was.  My teacher taught me to open my mind to other possibilities of reading other than the ones the teachers assigns us to spark my passion of reading.

            Furthermore, reading and writing will continue to play a vital role in my life both in college and after I graduate.  While I’m in college most of my classes require me to read some sort of book whether it’s in my economics class learning about production lines, or in my mechanical engineering class learning about casting metal to make parts.  Almost all my classes also involve writing, where I will be forced to put my English skills to the test in order to create a research paper resulting in an excellent grade.  After I graduate I will continue to need reading, but mostly writing. As a mechanical engineer I will be designing parts, creating machinery, and making new items that I will have to create a report on. These reports will have to clearly explain not only how the part works but also why it is efficient and how it can be of assistance.  Most of the reading I will do after I graduate and even when I’m in college will be reading the internet for reviews of places and people.  For example, before I go to a place to get my car fixed or to stay in a hotel I’ll make sure that it has good reviews. The same goes for when it is election time and I’ll need to make an important choice as I vote for president and other important political positions. 

                 In conclusion, I have had many experiences that have shaped the way I read and write today that go all the way back to elementary school.  These experiences helped me learn about writing and reading and shaped me into the person I am today.  If not for these experiences I probably wouldn’t be very good at writing papers or reading novels and I know for sure that I wouldn’t like doing it either.  I’m glad that I have the ability to read and write well since these are key skills to have in college and life after college.