Learning Narrative

How I Learned

Learning in my household was a very important thing to my parents and they wanted to emphasize that to my sister and I from a young age. I am fortunate enough to have a very well-educated family, my mother attended Amherst College and her mother attended UPenn, where my aunt went and now my sister is attending now. Once my parents felt that we could retain what they tried to teach us, my parents would read to me and my sister before bed which then lead to us reading on our own together. And to make learning more enticing, my parents bought me and my sister games to play that had educational aspects within them. My dad would also make sure that even in the summer we were still doing something educational so we didn’t fall behind when we started school again. Along with just sitting at the dinner table and listening to the conversation being had, these aspects of my childhood developed me into being the student I am now.

Like many other children, books being read to me was the first taste of learning that I had from a young age. My parents would read to me, age 2, and my older sister, age 4, together at night, typically they read the Berenstain Bears to us. We loved those books and since my sister learned to read before I did, she would read the books to me as well when my parents couldn’t. I would then slowly pick up words and begin to sound them out and have my sister correct me since she had a basic knowledge of the words she could teach me new ones. Having both, my parents and my sister, read the books to me I could start to read the stories with some assistance a little earlier than most my age, around 3 and 4 years old. My parents also liked to hold me to similar standards that they held my sister to so that way I had a slight advantage. My grandmother also had a lot of the Berenstain Bears books at her house so when my parents were busy, my sister and I would read them together. Then once I was able to comfortably read those books on my own, I moved on to more difficult readings. I used to take out Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark from my elementary school’s library and loved to read those, even though they scared me pretty good. But those were some of the very few books I enjoyed reading when I could choose my own books. By having my parents and sister read to me, I was able to pick up reading with some ease as opposed to having me sit on the couch and just watch cartoons.

My fondest memory of learning was when I was the age of 5 when my parents brought home a V-Tech. I remember thinking at first that it was solely for fun and games like any other video game console is meant to be. But when I first started playing I quickly realized the games revolved around using logic and other mental skills to progress from level to level. The game I remember most was a game that had super heroes like Wolverine and Spiderman as the main character. You would go around doing many mini games as these characters and solve whatever problem was put in your path. One of these games had the objective of having to sort out various words as they fell down the screen and then put them in the right category of labelled bins. This game taught the player how to quickly decide what the words were and find the correct spot to put them in. Quick thinking was the skill that this game taught the player since they had to read the word and then match it with the right bin. Another game I recall very well was a game with Mickey Mouse, it followed him around as he had to get through a castle to save Minnie. This game was my favorite as there were mini games within it that incorporated timing and jumping from platform to platform while avoiding enemies. But the educational aspect of this game was the mini game that involved hand eye coordination along with literacy skills. The game involved words falling down the screen, and the player had to press the correct colored button on the controller as the word reached the bottom. Different colors on the pad meant whether the word was spelled correctly or not. This taught younger kids how to multitask in the sense of watching the screen and then knowing where each colored button was and then deciding if the word was spelled correctly or not. And the fact that the games were so fun for younger kids, they would keep playing repeatedly without even being aware that they were subliminally learning necessary skills. I know I would be glued to the screen for a long time just playing the same game constantly because I thought they were so fun and I wanted to be better than my sister. And it improved my spelling skills as I knew how to quickly identify when I spell something wrong or when someone else does.

One of my less enjoyable memories of learning was my dad giving me and my sister summer work booklets. These booklets were about 100-150 pages full of educational material that corresponded to the grade that my sister and I were entering the upcoming fall. Most distinctly, I remember the summer going into fourth grade, I was about 8 years old, the booklet had a lot of cursive in it. I was not too fond of cursive as I had, and still have, very bad handwriting so these exercises were especially difficult for me to complete. My dad would also be very thorough with his checking of our work, if he didn’t like the neatness of my writing, he would make me erase the whole page and start over. For at least an hour a day we had to work on these booklets or until we had reached a point where he felt that there was an adequate amount of progress made. Each booklet had a writing portion or some form of English along with math that was similar to what we already knew and some that would be introduced to us in the next grade. I despised these workbooks because I already didn’t like school to begin with, and now I was losing precious summer time to continue to do more school work. But in the end, I benefitted from being able to better my writing skills as there were even some prompts in the packet that my dad would read over and critique.

Because of my parents’ pressure on me and my sister to be educated and take our schooling seriously. Reading to us as young kids helped a lot with my reading skills along with other aspects of literacy for a good basis to grow off from once we began school. Making sure the games we played were also educational was another key factor in strengthening my developing mind for harder material I would learn in the future. And continuously working on something that related to school in the summer was another good tool to making sure that I stayed a good student even when classes weren’t in session. All these various pieces of my childhood are crucial to forming me to be the well educated person that I am today.