7B Reading is Not For Me

Ever since I was a little kid, I was never a good reader, nor did I enjoy reading.  The only time I would read a book was when I was assigned to for school.  Not only am I not a good reader, I never comprehend what I read.  Every time I got assigned to read a lot for homework I would dread having to do the reading.  Now that I am in college, we get assigned reading all the time.  Not only do we get a lot of reading, but most of our tests and quizzes are based on the reading we do outside of class.  So if you do not understand the reading, you will most likely not do well on the tests.

When I tell my teachers about my problem with not comprehending what I read, most of them say that taking notes while reading might help me understand the reading better.  The annoying part about having to take notes while reading is that it is very time consuming.  Another negative thing about taking notes while reading is that people tend to take too many notes and they end up writing down notes that are not useful.  Both of these concepts are my concerns with having to take notes while reading.  When I take notes on what I am reading I never know what to write down and then I end up either not writing down the important points, or I end up taking too many notes.

In my media class our first assignment was to read chapter one in our textbooks. When I first opened my book I looked ahead to see how many pages the first chapter was.  I was thinking it was going to be about 10 pages, but I was so wrong. The first chapter was 30 pages long.  I knew that our quiz was in a week and that I had to finish reading the chapter by then.  Instead of starting to read the chapter right away, I saved all of my reading for the week.  That is the first place I went wrong.  I started off taking notes when I started the chapter, but after awhile taking notes and reading took too long so I stopped taking notes.  When my teacher gave back the quizzes and I saw that I failed I knew it was because I didn't fully understand the material.

I told myself that for the next quiz I was going to take good notes throughout the whole chapter.  I made sure that I gave myself a head start on the reading and I took notes during the whole time I read the chapter.  Although taking notes was very time consuming, I got a 95 on my next quiz.  After doing well on this quiz I realized that sometimes you have to take the time to fully do something in order to succeed.  In the future when I have to read for my classes, I am going to be sure to take notes because I have learned that it is very useful.