One event in my life that shaped who I am today would be when I stopped going to high school. It was my sophomore year when I made a decision that I will regret for the rest of my life. At the time, I thought that school was a waste of my time and I could never understand what was so important about it. So without thinking of any outcomes it may cause, I stopped attending school and started hanging out with the wrong crowd, who also didn’t like school. My family never would’ve thought that I stopped going to class, because I always played it off like I was still doing good. As time went by, it had been months when I started to realize what I was missing out on. I really started to think about my future and where I was going to end up. I knew that I did want to make something of myself but couldn’t without a degree in anything. I guess you can say that I grew up in many ways, for example; the way I think now is different in every way than the way I thought then. After many deep thoughts about my future, I enrolled back in high school. It was a continuation school, I liked it a lot more than I used to. I was able to talk to my teachers about any problems. Until finally I caught up in all my credits and was able to graduate early. Now when I think of this dumb move I made, it just makes me sick.

My reading habits growing up weren’t that great. I never really sat down and read a book on my own time. Reading, to me has always been boring. Even when my parents read to me as a child I didn’t like it. My mother likes to read, but my dad does not like reading. Until I got older I realized I should’ve read books a lot more to understand sentence structures and other things. Also growing up, I was encouraged to read by family members, but I never listened to them. To me it seemed like they wanted to torture me with boredom, so I pretended to read. In reality I just stared at the pages aimlessly until I turned the page, every 5 minutes. I can honestly say that the first time I read an entire book was my freshmen year in high school. I liked reading and I wished I could sit and read but I didn’t have the patience. My life was always filled with too much entertainment to pay attention to a book. My younger sister is one of the few people in my family who loves to read, she is always reading a book when she has the free time. Unlike me she has read more books in her younger years than I read at that young age. Sometimes if I do read, I’ll start a book but I will not finish it. My sister is always talking about books that she has read and how good they are, or she’ll talk about her favorite one.

Reflection

The vocabulary words used in this class have helped my notice other words around me. I am now in the habit of looking for words that I am not familiar with as I read, and finding out what it means and how to use it in a sentence. After discovering a new word, I learn it and try to use it in everyday conversations. I have not yet found myself using any of these new words; I’m still learning and getting to understand when and how to use them. After a vocabulary test, these words stay in my head, I rarely forget a word that I have just recently learned. In this class, most of the words I have run into I have never herd. The strategies that we use to learn the words help a lot because we use them in practice sentences and other sources. Before I started attending read 56, I never had a lot of practice on vocabulary, not even in high school. Now that I am reading and looking for words that I don’t understand, I can notice them and point them out quickly. I’ll study one word over and over until I understand the proper meaning of that word before I go on to my next word. At the end of my studying I’ll go over all of them and try to use them in sentences. Sometimes I’ll also try to use them in sentences while talking to my family members. Sometimes they’re surprised at some of the words I use.