Reader/Writer Autobiography

Reading has always been a life-giving force for me; I suspect writing has to, but it wasn't as obvious to me as I viewed writing as a natural concurrent activity or follow up activity to reading. I remember reading voraciously as a child. In Lake City, where I lived from 4th grade until the end of 10th grade, we had a hedge of lilac bushes in our side yard. The hedge was well-developed; the bushes were probably 15 feet high. Within the hedge were spaces where a child could hide from other children, parents, and the sun. I spent many hours in those hedges, reading and dreaming of places I'd rather be, people I'd rather be, things I'd rather do. Books fueled my imagination and I remember, in particular, being partial to books with characters that wrote. Inspired by the dedication these characters devoted to their writing I also dedicated, and re-dedicated, myself to writing probably once every summer, if not more. While my writing was sporadic, my reading was not.

I do not rememer learning to read, it seems I have always known how. I know that I read well beyond my age level, using a work of adult non-fiction for a book report in 4th grade.

AUTHOR: Reben, Martha Ruth, 1911- TITLE: The healing woods, by Martha Reben [pseud.] PUBLISHER: London, Hammond, Hammond & Co. DATE: [1954] DESCRIPTION: 221 p., [4] . of plates ill., 1 map 21 cm. NOTES: Autobiographical. SUBJECT: Outdoor life. CO-AUTHOR: Rebentisch, Martha Ruth, 1911- NC3R MEMBERS: +ZNO+ ADK COLL. QH81.R285 H4

I stewed about the situation all day, ranted about it to my parents all evening. By the time I went to bed, I had not re-written a single part of the report, but I know that I had not yet made a decision. When I awoke the next morning, my course of action was crystal clear to me. Across the top of my paper, right under the place where she wrote "tell only the important parts," I scrawled in my always large and rounded penmanship:

It wasn't until I became involved with the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Marshall University in 1993 and then later with the Marshall University Writing Project in 1997 that I began to understand the place that writing held in my life. Thinking about writing as a process and a product helped me to understand that much of my life I have used writing as a way to understanding. My deliberate efforts with geometry proofs were not so much a labor of writing love, but more a labor of using the writing to thoroughly comprehend the thing I had set out to prove. All of the journals and papers that I discarded because they were messy were not wasted efforts (although they were wasted paper for which I am wholeheartedly sorry now) but drafts and pre-writings. My journaling, which I took up again in earnest around 1985, was a way of working things out--solving problems, practicing my ideas, discovering who I was.

All of my discoveries, on a personal level, have a tremendous impact upon who I am as a teacher. I believe firmly that the more one writes, the better one writes. I believe firmly that through writing people come to understand and know more than they understood or knew before the writing. I believe firmly that reading and writing are intricately connected; writing helps one to understand what one is reading, reading helps one to understand what one is writing, reading gives us more to write about, writing gives us more reading.

Lately, I have begun to wonder about the reading skills of my students. I require that students do a lot of reading prior to class periods and expect that reading to be done in order for them to participate fully in the day's activities. I know that some students find reading, at least academic reading, a difficult task...not the actual reading/decoding but the reading comprehension. I emphasize the need for ongoing education for proefssional development purposes and wonder how easy or difficult that might be for students if they struggle with making meaning of academic writing. I began reading Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann earlier this summer, based upon my sister's recommendation. She's a first grade teacher and has a very different perspective on reading than I do. I learned with writing, however, that assuming that students knew how to do certain things simply because they were in college was dangerous and I'm now learning that my assumptions about reading abilities are also dangerous, and wrong. As I'm reading, I'm beginning to form ideas about how to approach reading academic texts in my classes and how I can use informal writing assignments to strengthen reading comprehension strategies.