This one time, in the 7th grade, I had to do a book report on “Bridge to Terabithia”. The reason why I chose to do a report on this book was because of the fact that I had previously read the book. But the thing was, it was a while ago. And I merely skimmed the book so it looked like I was actually reading it because of the assignment at the time. I thought I had it in the bag. The questions didn’t seem too hard. The book was pretty short. I found plenty of online reviews and already made book reports for it. The reasoning for this mentality was simply because I didn’t enjoy reading.
My presentation went pretty smoothly, I answered and answered all of the stuff that I was expected to do. But my teacher thought differently. She started asking me about the little details about the book; asking me things like: “where did it take place”, “what happened before this significant event”, “what brand of butter did he get”, things like that. She quickly caught on and decided to spare me and cut the questions. As one would assume, I didn’t receive such a great grade.
This is significant to me because I don’t think I’ve ever felt as embarrassed as I was in front of a teacher before. And it made me change my mind in regards to how I viewed reading assignments. I always thought that I would perpetually find book reports to be difficult. After all, I’m assigned to read a book (not of my choice), answering questions (that I would have never bother to ask), and all in a short time frame. But I’ve come to realize that that is just a very unprofessional way of looking at things. I was basically slacking, just because I didn’t feel like doing it. And if I continued to just read and write about the same books over and over again, I’d get bored with those books a lot faster than the actual book report itself, which was the main thing that I didn’t want to do.
When I really think about it, I don’t have much of a preference for a place for reading or writing. Don’t you really only need the basics? A place to sit? Perhaps a lamp in places with insufficient lighting? Somewhere with a pencil sharpener? But when it really comes down to it, for me: it has to be in a stimulating environment; not a distracting one.
Most people like to read or write in a quiet place and, to an extent, in solitary. However, I feel that silence is often deafening and stifles a majority of the mental process that goes into understanding and producing material. Perhaps it stems from the fact that I don’t like to be alone. But I feel that it’s optimal for me to read or write in a place where people can be found doing the exact same thing; places like: the library or the living room. I’m not sure why, but it’s motivating to see people walk in and out, sit down and accompany me, ask for help or even help me. A majority of the time, I play music. I know that some may consider it as a bad habit, but it really does help me. I don’t find it distracting in one bit. As a musician, I often hear a lot of dynamics and movement within the song and I sort of develop this sense of mental imagery that just pushes me to move along with it. It’s something to encourage myself to be busy, just as everyone else. I just find it so distracting to just sit in a small room, bland walls, completely silent, with only just myself in it.
I know a lot of my preferences are typically the things that one would want to avoid when reading or writing, but I dunno dude. I’m not exactly sure how I would change it because I typically control what goes on in the environment that I’m in.
So it just works for me.
