My Story
Pritt, Drew

DREW: Being a natural athlete at that time in my life, you can't tell now, but a natural athlete at that time and just always being very competitive. The fact that I loved history and the fact that I loved politics, I wasn't reading "Tinky Winky goes to the Market" type children's books, I probably was the only third grader who was reading about the Kennedy family with the large books and there was this woman by the name of Mrs. Boyd who was the librarian and when she first saw all these big, massive books that I had checked out she was rather skeptical that I was reading them. So she gave me my very first interview when I came in to find out if I had read it and was rather interested by the fact of how much knowledge I had retained from that reading. In addition to that, it became a regular competition between me and this young girl by the name of Jenny Feebler who was in my class. She was just checking out all these other books herself and it became a competition. I can remember one summer I actually got an award because I logged in 170 books for the summer, successfully read, three more than what Jenny was able to get. So it was a big thing and then as I kind of grew with it before we moved away from Tennessee, one of the things that I remember that was so unique was the fact that in our school they had the summer reading program but kind of like when school first began, but you got to dress up as your favorite literary character and then it was a costume contest as well as a reading contest. So it added that facet to it and we were there at Covington Elementary in Covington, Tennessee, we were one of these charter schools that Lamar Alexander had started when he was governor of Tennessee. It was a public school but it had a different style in how they taught us. How it retained through my life was the fact that I've always been ahead of the game in terms of whenever they would test to see what your reading skill was always eons ahead of my class. Like when I took the ACT or when I take tests now if it's a reading comprehension, it's always the easiest part of the test for me because I know how to pick out the key words. The fact that I kept reading in terms of being able to type, when I'm on the computer I type about a hundred words per minute now with maybe 5% error but I grew up on the computer; I started with Condor 64 and kind of went with it and that's a system - it's kind of funny because now I can speak with clarity and also with a knowledge of many subjects, mainly in history and politics and I'm amazed that some people, I've been told because sometimes they're like, "Well how did you know all this?" Well it's because I was reading; when I was in second grade I was reading and the more you read and especially the younger that you are - just because somebody's young, just like we have found out that it's actually considered bad in the development of a baby to sit there and to talk to gibberish to them, I think the same is in terms of reading. In second grade if I could get the concepts of being able to read what White wrote about "The Making of the President" in 1964, "The Making of the President" in 1968, knowing that now as a political science major with an emphasis in campaign management, I actually approach most of the projects that I have here in college and sit here and go, "This effects the same strategy that you saw in a convention strategy in the 1950s." In addition to that in the 1990s that assisted me greatly in literacy was a program that we used to have here in the state of Arkansas called the Arkansas Quiz Bowl Challenge, in each college it was kind of like Jeopardy but it was based upon each of the high schools and would sit there and compete. One of the areas that was real funny was the fact that our team, and I went to Hermitage High School in rural Southeast Arkansas, back when it was just single, double, triple and then four A. I went to a very small, rural school but one of the places that we would rack up the points on our team and we consistently would make it up in the finals is the fact that in the quiz bowl they would have a number of questions that would deal with stories and they would say blah, blah, blah, in the bridge, and immediately fifty chance it was going to be the bridge over the river Quay or it might be something by Schultz Etson and the mere fact that I've seen those books in the library allowed me the ability to bring that forward in that part of my life. So reading at a young age, reading above my level allowed me to be a lot more successful, it's allowed me to be the student that I am today and the ability to make the better grades that can because I started reading so early.