Learning and English

As I became older and the school years came and went, so did my desire for school learning. I found myself resenting the structure, the requirements, and the differing subjects that were hurled my way. My grades were not bad, but could have been considerably better. As more than one of my report cards so eloquently put it, "He's a bright student, but he doesn't apply himself." Another thing that was a familiar sight in my records was, "...disturbs his neighbors." I have always found it hard to focus on things I was told to focus on--partly because I was told to focus on it.  However, give me something that I wanted to focus on or wanted to learn and it consumed me. One of those things came to be my love of reading. I was read to at a very young age, and it apparently sparked something within me. Reading allowed me to escape, to dream, to explore, to wonder, and to experience things through others' eyes and words. I read a lot back then. I was one of those kids that might be caught by a parent while reading under the covers with a flashlight late into the night. Reading stories really broadened my mind and made me think and analyze things. Reading others' viewpoints, ideas, and perspectives really helped me to question things.  I became a skeptic, a thinker, and random assembler of multiple fragments of thought.

When I was in my junior high years English was the only academic subject that came to me naturally. No matter what the specific subject, if it fell under the broad category we call English I seemed to always do well at it. Maybe it has something to do with me being the oldest of the five kids and having things explained to me in greater detail than I might otherwise had I been a later arrival in the family. Spelling, sentence structure, punctuation--all of those things have always been something that have come fairly easily to me.  I would like to credit Mrs. Emerson at Cascade Junior High School for actually reading to us in class.  It was she that first exposed me to classic literature, reading Charles Dickens' Great Expectations aloud to the class.

The desire to write that I've had in recent years makes me wish I had expanded my learning even more. It would have come in handy many times over. After all, I have enjoyed blogging and stuff like that for several years now. I have to believe I would be so much better at it had I studied harder. Isn't that always the case though? Story of my life. I do a great job at what has to be done, but not much more than that. I sometimes think I'm an above average achiever at being ordinary.