In my life, I have had a very minimal amount of notable experiences regarding my mastery of the English language. I was raised by an English speaking family, I began to start speaking at a fairly early age, similar to most kids. I absolutely loved reading, I went through a book a week. 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. None of this is really important to my story, except the part where I read a lot of books, but we will get into that later. But I just wanted to give some background on who I am and what my story is. In elementary school is where this experience began, it was in the sixth grade, shortly after the school year started and summer ended. Sixth grade was so very different from anything I was used to before, I mean, I was starting middle school. So different, anyways, with this new school experience obviously came more difficult, more demanding classes. The biggest and baddest one of these brand new classes was definitely English. Before then, I had never written an essay, had never been force fed so many books to read, most of which were extremely bleak and unappealing to 11 year old me, and most of all, had been tested on these books, which I would repeatedly fail 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, and history, where we would be tested so much on presidents I didn’t know and on wars I had no idea about. But English was easily the biggest difference from elementary school to middle school. I mean, I went from spelling tests and the magic treehouse fun reading time to detailed analyses on these lifeless, neverending 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 making anti reading pearls. My point is, I hated reading. Every time I would 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 just fully denounced reading books at all. I’m still struggling with this. I have not picked back  up the activity of reading for fun, and I am curious to see how I’ll fare when I start needing to read books for my classes. I can only 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.