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Megan Yates

Kjirsten Goeller

English 1101

20 May 2018

Learning Life Lessons as an 8-year-old

It was half way through the first semester of my 3rd grade year. Children in my class were

being called out of the room one by one. Not a single student, including myself, fully knew what

was going on. On the inside, my heart was pounding so hard at the thought of my name being

called next. I was always a very good student in school, so being called out of class for an

unknown reason was my biggest fear. When the students who were called out reentered the

room, my peers and I all flooded them with questions. “What is going on?” “Are you in

trouble?” “What happened?” They informed us that it was a timed reading test to see how much

we were capable of reading in a short period of time. I quickly began to worry about the whole

situation because I was ill prepared for it and was not expecting it. In this moment, I never knew

how much this small event would affect me in the future, and how it would help me become a

more sufficient learner.

Soon enough, my name was called out. It was by a very intimidating lady who I had

never seen before. I rose out of my seat very slowly. The whole idea of having to try my hardest

to read as much as I could in a very short amount of time made me so anxious and nervous that I

felt as if I was at the top of a rollercoaster waiting for the first big drop. Everything felt as if it

were happening in slow motion. I finally got to the unknown lady who just said a simple,

“Follow me.”
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I followed her to a small desk placed in the hallway. I looked around and realized that my

class was not the only one doing this; it was my whole grade. There were other children reading

as fast as they could all around me. Even though there were only about 5 other kids out there,

their words were so jumbled that I felt as if I were standing in the middle of a city with thousands

of people. I had no idea what to expect.

I sat in the chair at the desk across from the unknown lady. The lady, whose name I found

out to be Ms. Price, explained how the process worked. She informed me that the process was

just to see how fast I can read and how well I can understand what I am reading. She told me that

nothing counts for or against me in this process, but all she would be doing is counting how

many words I read and pronounce correctly in a 1 minute and 30 seconds time frame.

The second she said, “go,” and I heard her click the small white timer, I became very

overwhelmed. I am typically a very fast and accurate reader, but I was so stressed those skills

completely slipped away from me. I was too focused on having to do what I thought was good,

and all the other things going on around me. I stuttered through-out the whole 90 seconds and

mispronounced words that I knew how to pronounce. I knew the timer was ticking, but I became

too focused on how much time I thought I had left, rather than just focusing on what was right in

front on me. I was focused on just about everything, except reading the passage.

The timer finally beeped. The beep sounded like a semi-truck’s horn to me, and I was

completely startled by it. In my mind, I had failed. I was nervous to walk back into class and

have everyone ask me how it went or how well I did. I looked down at the booklet I was reading

from and realized that I had absolutely no clue of what I had just read 30 seconds ago. I gazed

straight across the desk to the copy Ms. Price had and saw the words highlighted in fluorescent
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pink. Those highlighter marks were everything I messed up. I was so disappointed in myself for

letting everything around me get into my head that I did not perform as well as I wanted to.

Today, every time I start to get overwhelmed, I think back to this day. I remember how 8-

year-old me let everything else get the best of her and how poorly she performed. I remember

that if I would have just focused on what really needed to be focused on, I would have done

remarkably better. I learned to not care about what was going on around me and to just focus on

what needed to be focused on from this small incident in 3rd grade.