Childhood Reading Memories Reflection

I have no memories of reading or being read to as a kid. My mom worked full time and was in night school and my dad wasn't really involved. In elementary, middle, and high school, I read for classwork or homework but I didn't read outside of what I was required to. 

It wasn't until college that I considered myself a reader. And even then it wasn't until my junior year. I took a critical theory class with Dr. Betensky (she still teaches at URI!) and really fell in love with reading and critical thinking pretty simultaneously. Our main text book was The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 

Pretty wild to think that this is what got me into reading but it's true. Derrida, Foucault, Marx, and Butler are just a few of the theorist we read over the semester. The content was challenging but I found myself eager to understand. This was partly due to Dr. Betensky's teaching method. She didn't wait for you to raise your hand, she expected us all to have read the content, so she called on anyone at random to answer. I never wanted to be caught without an answer even though I hated/was petrified of talking in front of the class. 

My last semester at URI, I took another class with her. It was a graduate level course focused entirely on the Victorian author Anthony Trollope. She could see it in my face that I would be working something out in my head about the discussion that was happening in class and she would always encourage me to speak up. "Tara, you look like you're thinking. What do you have to say?"

She was my own, John Keating (see: Dead Poets Society). 

But, more than that, she gave me my love of words, of reading. I am forever grateful for her because I would not be who I am today without learning to love to read.