Lessons Learned From Reading Regularly by Eric

Lessons Learned From Reading Regularly by Eric - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

The most important lesson I have learned from a previous teacher, my English IV Honors teacher, Shawn Watkins, was to read on a consistent basis, the benefits of doing so are innumerable. Although I already knew that reading was generally beneficial for you, I did not fully grasp the benefits of reading regularly and just assumed reading was primarily reserved for “extreme nerds”. I remember sitting in his class in the first week of my junior year as he said “like working out your muscles in the gym, reading is brain exercise, and if you don’t use it, you are likely going to lose it.” Initially, at the time, I blanked him out, I was too busy worried about hockey, girls, or even what the weather was like outside. However, he eventually impressed upon me the concept that when your brain becomes actively involved in a piece of literature, text, a document, etc. you’re simultaneously stimulating all you major senses, recollecting older, potentially fond memories that build relationships between you, the text your reading, and the characters involved. He also mentioned that you are strengthening the brain’s pre-existing neural pathways as well as initiating new ones by reading regularly. I knew that I needed to pick-up my grades in my final few semesters of high school if I was to have any chance at going to a nice 4-year institution. He eventually challenged me to read every day at least for 30-45 minutes a day throughout the semester, and observe the differences not only in my academics, but in how I interacted with others socially. I also vividly remember that he mentioned reading before going to bed has been shown to further enhance the benefits of reading because your brain typically remembers the first and last things you do over the course of a day.
Hence, left with few options, I decided to take him up on this and began reading regularly before bedtime, and within the first few weeks of this challenge, I was already becoming acutely aware of my increased attentiveness and more efficient retention of information in class. The last 3 semesters of high school ended up becoming the best of my entire adolescence, both socially and academically. They marked the first & only times I have ever received all As on my report card and if it wasn’t for these last 3 semesters raising my GPA, I likely may have never made it into NC State University, where I currently reside. The second half of my sophomore year was particularly rough for me, as I suffered from the first heartbreak of my life, i.e. “girl problems” and after playing hockey for 10 years in Raleigh I was heartbroken and hoodwinked by the treatment I received from the coaching staff of my last team. When you go out to California & Chicago and only see the ice 5 times in total, you become fairly disgruntled, especially after you had already been sitting the bench for a month prior to. Thus, reading helped me relax and stay focused through this remarkably dismal period I was stuck in and not only survive, but succeed coming out the other side. In fact, by the very next year, I went to play for the Greensboro Stars and ended up winning the USA Hockey Tier II National Championship, marking the first time any hockey team from the Carolinas won a youth hockey championship.
3 years passed and through a friend, I eventually caved-in and decided to create a Facebook account. Several months went by and then out of the blue, I received a notification that my english teacher invited me to come down to see him at a local restaurant. When I first saw him again, he had the usual grin on his face as he held his 6-string guitar, and without skipping a beat, he asked me “what did you read today?”