It may surprise you, but I HATED reading as a child.  I was slow.  Any new word I came across was incomprehensible to me.  I had no word attack skills.

All of this was despite the fact that my parents did all the right things: they took us to the library, we had books all over our house, they read, we read, they read to us, we read to each other. But still… I was bad at reading.

Now, if you asked me as a kid if I was bad at reading, I would have told you no.  My ego as a kid was anything but child-sized.  I wasn’t a bad reader – I was just a slow reader.  But I continued to secretly hate it and crave it at the same time. I wanted to do what everyone else seemed to do with ease. 

I muddled my way through elementary and middle school. I learned to fake read with the best.  I was great at trying to read the beginning of an assignment and then asking my friends for the main points and getting enough from a few different people that I could fake my way through assignments. 

Then in high school, something amazing happened. It was glorious!  Summaries of books were readily available on this thing called the internet!  I still asked friends for help, because reading the summaries themselves could be quite the daunting task at times. 

But in high school, something else changed too.  I decided that if I wanted to go to college (and I knew I did), then I would have to figure out how to get through books by myself.  My main strategy was to just sit down and read my assignments.  It took me hours longer than others to get through the same textbooks and short stories, but I did it.  I started actually reading the words on the page.  I started actually doing the thing that everyone else could do apparently much easier than I could.  It wasn’t pretty, and it took forever, but my junior year in high school, I finally read an ENTIRE book assigned for English class. 

Skip ahead a few years (or maybe a decade+) and here I am.  I’ve discovered my reading problems stem from Dyslexia.  The best intervention that ever happened for my reading difficulties was becoming a reading teacher myself.  Through teaching kids phonics in a systematic way, I was teaching myself too.  It was odd to be a twenty-something year old teacher having the same “Ah-ha moments” about phonemes and graphemes as my elementary students.  But that was reality. 

All of this is to say that I never want students to feel the way I did.  I want students, especially those that struggle, to feel empowered by reading.  To love it.  To see that it can teach you new things. To see that it can take you places you’ve never been.  This is what drives me.  This is the inspiration behind iHeartLiteracy.