Imagine yourself in this scenario; you are requested by your teachers to start reading, but you just ignore whatever the teachers say. Now, fast forward 3 years, you are in your last years of junior high and you absolutely regret not following your teacher’s advice. This is the exact situation I was in, I always thought I could just ignore reading and still get good grades in English, but sadly, it doesn’t work like that. I had to find this out the hard way. In 7th grade, I read a whopping amount of two books in the whole school year. The next year, our teacher gave us the goal to read at least 30 books in the school year. Thirty long and excruciating books was what I thought at first. I couldn’t just ignore it this time, since this was tied to our report card. The first book of the school year was painful, I couldn’t imagine myself reading 29 more books like this. Luckily for me, my teachers were able to find me an author that really interested me to read his books. This really helped me out, I read around 15 books by the author. That was basically half of my goal, the rest of the books were about topics that I was interested in. I am a basketball fan, so around 10 of my books were about basketball. The remaining 5 books were all teacher suggestions, my teacher always recommended a new book every day. I noted some of these down and decided to check them out. One key tip I would give to any junior high student is to ask teachers for suggestions on what books to read. Teachers have the best taste in books, and they also know their students’ interests. Now you might think, “Ok, but how does this benefit me?”. Reading is the biggest piece in the puzzle of achieving good grades. The foundation of learning and developing the human mind is reading. Why else do you think reading is one of the first things taught to us? I am only a junior high student, but many of my relatives who had gone to colleges and universities have told me that they wished they had strengthened their reading abilities in their younger years. The amount of reading you have to do in high school and post-secondary is way more than what we do in junior high. If we have not already built up the stamina for reading that long, how will we survive in those conditions? Having the ability to read for long times is a beneficial tool in high school and later on as well. Not only that, reading just makes you smarter in daily life situations. It expands your wisdom into areas you never thought of. It opens doors in your mind to become wiser and more intellectual. Your worldview begins to expand and you become more aware of everything happening near you. For me, the biggest benefit of reading is that it helps me sleep. I am not a good sleeper, so my parents told me to try reading before I go to bed and it completely changed my sleep schedule. I was able to snooze off instantly and this meant I wasn’t awake late at night on my phone. Those thoughts that you collect from reading are carried on into your dreams, so I wouldn’t suggest reading a horror book before sleeping. Reading has many benefits, and it still surprises me how people try to write it off as ineffective. It improves so many aspects of your life that you never thought it could. Reading is not only a tool, but it is a part of your mind.
Edited by DEEPTI
Sidak is a grade 9 student attending A. Blair Mcpherson School in Edmonton, Alberta. He loves playing basketball with his friends and reading books about basketball. His favorite subjects are math and science and he loves making everyone around him happier.