When Reading Became a Passion
Rayburn, Stephen

>>STEPHEN: My name is Steve Rayburn and this is a story about what I think of when I think of my literacy narrative. I grew up in a family of readers and the TV would always be on but my mom would be on the couch with a magazine and my dad would be in the chair with a book. My sister would be in her room reading with music going and I was about the only one in the family that watched TV. I learned to read in first grade with Dick and Jane and I always liked reading but I wasn't an avid reader at all until fourth grade. So when I think about a literacy story or narrative, I know there are all sorts of things about when I feel like I really learned to write and learning to use technology but I think it all goes back to that fourth grade experience. In my school when I was in fourth grade, there was one book in the library that had a huge waiting list. If you wanted to read it you had to get your name on the waiting list because everybody in the school was reading it and so I got my name on the waiting list and when I got that book and started reading it I just was overtaken with it. I remember devouring the book; I think I read it again before I turned it back in to the library and every year after that from fourth grade through junior high school, I read that book every year. The book was Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time", a fairly new book at that point; I think it came out in 1962 and this was 1963-64 school year. I remember after reading that I read all the time. I spent the whole summer, like my sister, holed up in my room reading with the radio on a top forty radio station. I read the books we had from the library, borrowed books from friends and I think that was a pivotal point in my literacy because that's when reading actually became a passion for me; so that's it.