Children's Literature Autobiography

I relate literature to a roller coaster. I have had so many up and downs in my life. There are times where literature was a fun activity and then there were times when reading was a chore. As I grew older I innately began to distinguish two types of literature, one where I do on my own time and the other which is required. Over a period of time my leisure reading continually waned whereas my required reading began to increase.
My experience in literature stems from my parents. My mother would read to me nightly. I remember the first book I loved was the Ugly Duckling. I loved the book so much that I memorized the words to the book and tricked my family into believing that I could read at age four with no training. When I entered school I was exposed to books and reading, so it was an easy transition when I entered school. I picked up reading easily and was the top reader in my class for first, second, and third grade. I was constantly complimented on my reading by my teachers and it felt good to have such positive reinforcement in my reading. I was encouraged to go to the library on my own to check out books as a reward for finishing work early. I do not remember much of the books that I read early, but there are certain books I do remember. Willy Wonka and Space Travel, Matilda, and tons of biographies on athletes were some of the literature I was reading.
One of the best literary moments in school came on a read aloud in the fifth grade. My teacher read, Where the Red Fern Grows aloud. This book reached me as well as others in the class. If the class was acting up our teacher would threaten to not read the book to us in class. This would actually work on most of the class because we were so encaptured in the book. To be honest I do not remember the plot or many characters, but I do remember the impact the book had me and my classmates. It was my first experience with a book that grabbed hold of me. I had never felt that feeling before. I also remember in the same grade, that the teacher would let us read silently every Friday for one hour to our selves. She would let us choose any book we wanted and eat a snack and a clear liquid. This was my only teacher that I can remember that allotted time for the whole class to have free reading time. She had the most impact early on in my development as a reader.
The next year the only type of reading that our teacher did was in the form of book reports. Most of the time I did not even read the book I would just copy from the back of the book, and I received my passing grades with no problem. This was pretty much the theme for most of middle school. We did read from the text aloud in class and then answer some questions after we read. One creative idea was the construction of a diorama and then the creation of a documentary from biographies that we could choose. Those were the highlights from middle school.
The beginning of high school began the trend to Advanced Placement classes. This entailed the reading of many fine classics and then doing some sort of literary analysis. Teachers always harped on thinking deeper, delve deeper, or analyze this book. Use a yellow highlighter for diction and a green one for imagery. This was what happened in most of my literature classes in High School. The author that appears over and over again, and is not a welcome sight for any teenager is William Shakespeare. To this day I can not read Shakespeare. Two reasons I do not like Shakespeare is first I can not understand his plays and second it is irrelevant to teenagers. The worst book that was assigned was The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner. I did not understand this book and I do not think that I got past the second chapter.
There were a few good books that I read in High School that I really enjoyed, but they only let me down. My favorite book was Wuthering Heights. I really enjoyed it and I read it over Christmas break. I finished the book way ahead of schedule and I was looking forward to actually knowing something about the book in class. The teacher began by analyzing some theme about the book, which I really did not get. The theme she went over was not something I was interested in. I thought that since I did not get the same feeling as she talked about, that I did not fully understand the book myself. I felt that I was not smart because I did not think intelligently like the others in the class. Now I realize that just because I did not pick up the same theme does not mean that I am any less intelligent. I had my own thoughts hers were from literary analysis book she bought. There was also no major discussion or feeling from the class. This was extremely disappointing because I really enjoyed the book and was looking forward to discussing the book for it not to happen. Another book I really enjoyed was The Good Earth. This was another book that I really enjoyed, but the teacher did not really care much about it. So all we did was just skim it and move on to some other book.
Overall I do enjoy reading but I suffered a rough patch during the high school years and it took a while to regain some sort of mild passion for books. Nowadays I read John Grisham books, historical books and my favorite type of reading is fantasy books. In writing this I have learned that I do enjoy reading and I started off well in my early years reading. In middle school I continued to read a little, but in high school my reading declined significantly. During college reading was not on priority list and now that I am trying to obtain my teachers certification I started to read again. I did feel discouraged about reading at one time, but no longer can I let negative experience influence what I do.