Loving Literature by Alissa

Loving Literature by Alissa - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

For as long as I can remember I have loved to read. My mom told me that I was the first of my three siblings to learn to distinguish words amidst a jumble of letters. I was also the first to seek enjoyment in literature, the first to fall madly, deeply, obsessively in love with fictional words and characters, the first to purchase a book of my own free will (and with my own hard-earned money), and the first to know what it truly meant to read. Although reading has been a lifelong love, I can remember the day it transformed into something more than just an all-engrossing escape for me - the spring of my eighth grade year in Mrs. Caitlin Olshefski's class. She was teaching about Edgar Alan Poe that day - talking about how each and every word meant something and how the outward meaning of his works hid deeper lessons only to be discovered by the thoughtful. I listened. She spoke. In those minutes the force of literature grew into something so much more thrilling and powerful than it had ever been before. Surrounded by bleary-eyed zombie students and attentive teacher's pets, I knew then and there that, if I ever became a teacher, I would become a teacher of Literature.
My infatuation with English teachers began long before that fateful sunny day, though. In Kindergarten, when I was homeschooled, I liked my teacher (my mom) most when she was reading to us from some cheery children's book such as "Charlotte's Web" or "Mr. Popper's Penguins." In second grade I was cast under a magic spell whenever my teacher would begin an English lesson. The enchantment was so strong, in fact, that when my mom came to take me out to lunch at Jack-in-the-Box one day, I wanted to stay in school instead to hear the end of a story. In fifth grade I had a desperate crush on my teacher whose most defining quality to me, at my young age, was his animation as he spoke about books and their contents. Those quiet moments so long ago, as I sat in a comfy chair, picking at my socks or on the itchy carpet of the public school or outside on the cool grass under a perfect sky, as I listened to the voice of my teacher rising and falling, creating worlds and people and emotions from nothing, were what began to shape my life and how I viewed everything. The small details of reading and being read to were indiscernible drops of sunlight that trickled their way into my heart and warmed my soul.
This warmth stayed with me until that day when, with the revelation that books were so much more than words depicting adventures, it sprung forth into an all-encompassing golden awe of what literature could be and could say and could do. Mrs. Olshefski took that slight, buried heat and revealed to it its true borders, fanning a wildfire into existence. I realized that, before that moment, I had been missing so very much. I had barely touched the surface of what literature had to offer. And it was both a terrifying and a devastatingly exciting thought.
What Mrs. Olshefski did for me I want to do for others. She revealed to me how to truly read, how to see what is hidden within books, how to think and question and wonder at words. Of course most people already know that books are so much more than the stories they tell. I will not pretend that I am some magical goddess here to impart my omniscient wisdom upon the unenlightened masses of college students, but I would like to somehow recreate that wonder that Mrs. Olshefski brought to me. If not in the same way she did for me, then in some other manner. I would love to read to my class and speak to them about the words, to wonder at what the author is truly trying to say, to explore the implications such a work has on us, and to discuss the relevance and place it has in the world. In doing this I hope that somehow, someway that pure joy and exhilaration at reading will be passed on to someone new.