Hi my name is Beau Schmeusser I am 18 years old and I am studying business administration here at Stevenson. I came to Stevenson to earn a bachelor degree but also to pursue my love for lacrosse. I am the middle child, I have an older brother and younger sister, also been very close with my family. I grew up in a small town in chester county called Kennett square. I attended Kennett consolidated school district where I spent all 12 years of my early education. I have always had a love for sports growing up, playing baseball, basketball, soccer and lacrosse.
If you would have asked me 10 years ago where I thought I would be, I don’t think I would have said a college student as stevenson university. When I was little I hated reading more than anything in the world. You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to read a book.
To start I was never the best at school and didn’t pick up on things fast as a child. I had setbacks due to my reading and writing skills. I had to take special education classes all the way up until high school. One very helpful and important person that aided me to overcome these challenges was Mrs. Knight. We always referred to her as Mrs. K. She was my elementary Special Ed teacher for reading and writing. She was a fairly old lady with gray hair and always had a smile on her face. I was in here class all through elementary school which substituted my normal reading classes. I was one out of the other ten kids that took that class. She helped us pick up on the basic skills of reading and writing and helped teach us in different methods so that we could better understand. She would help better explain things that we could not get a grasp of for example vocab and grammar. We would have vocabulary exercises to complete each day and always had a read aloud with Mrs. Knight before leaving for the day. I couldn’t image where I would be today without having Mrs. Knight help as a young child.
Another tool I used to help me learn how to read and write was a program called Read Naturally. This was one of our assignments we had to compete in Mrs. Knight room. Luckey our school district had bought the program for our class to use. It consisted of about five different reading levels with each reading level having 100 stories. It also came with cassette tape player and cassette. The way the program worked was to have a cold time, which would be reading the story for the first time and taking a baseline score. Once you had your score you had to approve upon that score to pass that story and move onto the next one. You would have the story read to you on the cassette player a certain amount of times, then practice on the vocabulary you don’t understand , and then practice the story yourself enough times until you think you got it down. Once you were ready would take your hot time with your teacher and hoped your passed the story. This program gave the the extra practice I needed to become more fluent as a reader and also gave me more confidence as a reader.
My final influence that helped me to read and write was my freshmen and sophomore english teacher. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Mcdonald- Jones but always went by Mrs. Mc J. She was a very nice and understanding teacher, but also became very strict when it came time to work. She was also a die hard penn state fan after graduating from the school with a degree for teaching. As I entered high school my reading skills had improved but still needed some work. She helped me expand on my knowledge of different writing styles, like compare and contrast essays, informational essays, narratives. This really opened my eyes to new ways of writing so I wasn’t writing the same boring thing over and over. Before high school I knew of those techniques but never knew how to apply them to my writing. She also gave me tremendous amounts of useful feedback on my essays and held conferences with each kid in the class to explain what you were doing wrong and how to correct your errors. Having those important conferences really improved my grammar skills and taught me how to take my writing to the next level and also prepare myself for college. I am so grateful to have all these positive influential tool/people in my life to help me succeed and be where I am today.
In the end I know that everything I have accomplished so far in my life regarding my reading and writing skills will benefit me in my future. After graduating from college with a business degree, I plan to take over my family’s construction company. I am going to need all the stills I have learned in writing and read to complete the complicated tasks in the construction world. Having learned these skills will give me the advantage in sounding more sophisticated and more respected talking to customers. It will influence my life goals and allow myself to set higher standards than I ever thought I would be able to. My journey is not over yet and am excited to learn the rest of the skills I need to be a contributing human in society.