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Kenny Navarrete
Professor Derohanessian
English 115
24 September 2014
Experiences Through Literature
I have never enjoyed reading and writing growing up at least not until high school. A big
reason why I feel like I never found reading fun was because in elementary school and middle
school, I had a summer reading assignment and to me the books we were supposed to read were
never interesting. For example, what middle school student wants to read To Kill a Mockingbird?
Now I have come to realize that To Kill a Mockingbird is actually a good story to read because I
ended up reading it again in ninth grade. But in high school there were many things that shaped
my appreciation for writing and why I read a lot more now than I did before. Although I did not
like reading before, as I grew up, I continued to read and write and began enjoying both because
of a great teacher who really changed the way I thought about the two.
I really dont remember the books I read or the papers I wrote from when I was in
elementary school. I do remember that I would go with my class to the library once a week
where we would check out a book and I used to check out the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine.
Those R.L. Stine books were the first books that I actually enjoyed reading. Also we would write
small one paragraph essays, so writing I didnt really care to much for it until later on when I was
in high school. When I was in elementary school I only remember liking the Goosebumps books
and The Chronicles of Narnia books and in middle school I dont even remember liking any
books. Although in seventh grade I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird and I read Farewell to
Manzanar in eighth grade, which I also later read in tenth grade. But for the most part I only read

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those two books in middle school because I knew that I had too. When I was in middle school I
thought of all these books to be very boring and not relatable to a twelve/thirteen year old boy
and I do not feel like they really were relatable, but do not get me wrong To Kill a Mockingbird
and Farewell to Manzanar are two very good books that talk about important issues and have a
great plot and story line, its just that as a young kids no one thinks or cares about all of that. I
got into the Narnia books because we read it in sixth grade and then I saw the movie and I just
thought that was something really interesting and it was the same thing with the Goosebumps
books I used to watch the television shows too. None of those books are really relatable either
because they are both fiction/fantasy and the things that happen in those books would never
happen in real life, but what they do is they play with kids imagination and really bring things
that interest kids to life. If I went back and read those books I would probably not care too much
about them because they would not have the same effect on me now. When I was younger I also
tried reading the Harry Potter books because I used to watch the movies but those books were
too long for a little kid who was not even into reading books. It was probably just my age from
when I was younger in elementary school that I thought books were boring and only fun to read
if I saw it as a movie or a television show, now I enjoy just reading books for fun when I have
the time to do it.
When I got to high school the first reading assignment I had to do was read To Kill a
Mockingbird, but this time around we read it together as a class in my English class. Now it
made more sense because as we read the story together the teacher would explain what the
author was saying or what the author meant by certain things that happened in the book. For
example when Atticus was explaining to Scout why you can never kill a mockingbird that never
made sense to me like why was that included but the my teacher explained that you never really

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understand someone until you see the world from their perspective. The same thing happened
with Farewell to Manzanar, I read it in eighth grade then read it in tenth grade and then I thought
it was a good book. I feel that it was just the way the teachers taught in my high school just made
things so much easier and enjoyable, when reading the school required books. My eleventh grade
year was the year when I truly got into reading, the books we read that year were so much more
interesting. I read Anthem, Enders Game, Scarlet Letter, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The
Great Gatsby, and Death of a Salesman, I thought all of those books were really interesting. My
eleventh grade English teacher, Mr. Kelley, was one of the best teachers I had ever had. I feel
like he is the one that got me more into reading, because Mr. Kelley was more of a literature and
writing English teacher and the class was more focused on those two subjects, the focus was not
on grammar to much. I felt the same way about Mr. Kelley as the way Mike Rose, author of the
short reading I Just Wanna Be Average, felt about his teacher Mr. MacFarland, as Rose says
MacFarlands lectures were crafted, and as he delivered them he would pace the room jiggling a
piece of chalk in his cupped hand, using it to scribble on the board the names of all the writers
and philosophers and plays and novels he was weaving into his discussion (Rose 5). This is the
same way I would explain the how Mr. Kelley taught and how his lectures would go, the lectures
were interesting he would really get into acting out scenes from the books such as in Scarlett
Letter when the main protagonist of the book, Hester Prynne, was on the scaffold with two other
characters Pearl and Dimmesdale and they are all letting out all their guilt and yelling. When we
were reading that part of the book, Mr. Kelley went and stood on top of the counters on the side
of the classroom and was yelling and just really making that part of the book even more
powerful, because anyone who has read the book would know that it is a critical part of the story.
Mr. Kelley would do crazy things to help his students learn and understand the class better.

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Mr. Kelley also focused a lot on writing as well, and just like literature he was very good
at teaching it. At my high school students must write your first research paper in eleventh grade,
and Mr. Kelley had a great way of having us go through the process of learning how to write
one. The research paper is a really big deal in eleventh grade, students need twenty citations from
at least five different sources and it has to be at least six pages and it counts for a lot of students
grade in the second semester because we pretty much spend the entire semester writing it. The
process that Mr. Kelley showed us is a good one that will keep students from procrastinating,
keep it all very organized and make it the so the paper is not so difficult to write. Everyone got a
randomly selected topic about U.S. History because in eleventh grade students also are taking a
U.S. History class so their history teacher grades it as well. I later used Mr. Kelleys method and
process for writing a research paper in twelfth grade and this time around we only had one month
to write the paper but it was a lot easier now because I knew how I had to write now and I think I
ended up finishing it a week earlier than when it was actually due. Writing truly is a process, like
how Amy Lamott, author of Shitty First Drafts, says, In fact, the only way I can get anything
written at all is to write really, really shitty drafts (Lamott 1). I completely agree with Lamott
when she says this, because I learned this from Mr. Kelley from when I was writing my rough
draft for the research paper, there was not anybody who could have written the first draft of the
paper and submit for grading because when Mr. Kelley gave us all back our research papers after
he reviewed the rough drafts everyones paper had corrections and red markings all over the
paper. My eleventh grade year was my favorite year when it came to English class because I
learned a lot of new ideas and ways of writing a research paper.
Even though reading came hard to me at first I learned to really appreciate it and ended
up really liking the to read and write now because of my English teacher Mr. Kelley. He really

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got me into reading and also for helped me become a better writer. After my junior year my
senior year English class was extremely easy because now I understood a lot of topics in English
that I previously would not have comprehended. Now I actually do like reading books, and
writing essays is little more enjoyable. But as a little kid I completely disliked English class
because I thought that it was very boring but now that I am older and have had better English
teachers in high school who really knew how to teach the material we were learning in class and
who were really able to teach me the material to the point were I comprehend the subject and
understand what they are teaching and at the same time enjoy the class.

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Works Cited
Lamott, Anne. "Shitty First Drafts." Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New
York: Anchor, 1995. 1-2. Print.
Rose, Mike. I Just Wanna Be Average. Rereading America 7th ed. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert
Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2007. 161-172. Print.