In my life, I had a very minimal amount of notable experiences regarding my mastery of the English language. I was raised in an English speaking family, I started speaking at the same age as most kids. I absolutely loved reading, I went through a book a week. In fourth grade I literally had a hunger games themed birthday party where I made my friends recreate my favorite scenes. My parents put me in sports, even though I utterly despised them, all I really wanted to do was to play my video games at home and run around outside. Because of these, in general I was a pretty well rounded kid. Middle school is where my experience began, it was in the sixth grade, shortly after the school year started and summer ended. Sixth grade was very different from anything I was used to before, I mean, I was starting middle school, it was a whole new world. With this new school experience obviously came more difficult, more demanding classes. The biggest and baddest of these brand new classes was definitely English. Before then, I had never written an essay, had never been forced to read so many books, most of which were extremely bleak and unappealing to 11 year old me. Holes by Louis Sachar felt like it was going on forever, and Bridge to Terabithia left me feeling hopeless. And worst of all, I’d been tested on these books. Pages upon pages asking me whether the sky was cloudy or sunny in chapter 11, if the main character liked dogs or cats, or whatever niche details they could find. I quickly learned testing was not my strong suit, after I repeatedly failed these over and over again… Of course, my other classes were pretty rough, math was introducing new equations with letters and so much complexities they made my head hurt, I actually had to learn science frequently, which was previously a class I only had once in a while, only doing experiments and visually appealing things like making fake volcanoes, and history, where we would be tested on presidents I didn’t know and wars I had no idea were fought. But English was easily the biggest juxtaposition from elementary school to middle school. I mean, I went from spelling tests and reading the magic treehouse to detailed analyses on these lifeless, never-ending books. At this point in time was when I stopped having such a fondness for reading, and I started to slightly resent it. Over time, through more and more reading based assignments, that seed of resentment which was planted in the sixth grade began to grow and grow into more of a resentment apple tree, producing apples of hatred for reading. It didn’t have to be apples though, you could imagine it as an evil coconut tree, or a strawberry bush, or an anti reading clam producing anti reading pearls. My point is, I hated reading. Every time I read it felt like a chore, and I completely stopped reading for recreational purposes and only read when school absolutely forced me to. And eventually I even found ways to avoid reading completely. For assignments where I had to read, I would look up notes on the book on the internet, I would cheat on tests, I fully denounced reading books at all. The first book I straight-up refused to read was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I remember being assigned that book for summer reading when I was entering my freshman year of high school, and I bought it the week after it was assigned to force myself to read it. It seemed alright, it had a blue color which attracted me since it was my favorite color, and my teacher spoke highly of it. She said it was her favorite book at our age, and I was honestly excited to start. We had a weekly journal we would have to log our thoughts on the book in, and for the first week or two I actually read the chapters and wrote from my heart. I rode along with the book because I assumed it had a slow start, like many great books. But looking back, I hated it. The few chapters I read featured endless walking, mourning, sulking, and the occasional interaction between characters. I thought that would end and some action would unfold but that was not the case. That was the book in its entirety, sad and sullen. This was the last thing I expected, especially after my teacher praised it so highly. It was the most dull thing I’ve ever read. The book felt so bleak and it felt like such a drag to revisit every week, so I stopped. I looked up summaries of each chapter and wrote loose interpretations of things that many other people said before me. And by the end of the summer, I finished my homework without reading 90 percent of the book. This made me feel genius, I’d discovered a cheat code to never need to sit through a boring book again, but still get good grades on my work. I went on to do this throughout middle and high school, taking the easy route. I’m still struggling with this. I haven’t picked back up the activity of reading for fun, and I started reading books for class, but it still makes me feel terrible. This experience definitely took a toll on my reading comprehension skills, now all I can do is force myself to read and hope that I still can. I know I can’t be the only person in the world experiencing this, and I think it speaks to a larger issue of many failed attempts at making a child-friendly education program that encourages learning instead of treating it like a chore. I think it’s extremely important we face these issues now, especially in the current political climate, where people in power benefit from the fact that nobody can read anymore, and rule with easily disproven facts and tactics. Such as our president, who spreads hateful false rhetoric against people of color, women, and the LGBT+ community, and is met with undying supporters who genuinely believe he’s speaking truths. It will only get worse and more dangerous for everyone if we don’t look inward, not only at the education systems failures, but at our own personal failures to step up and educate ourselves.