Chicken Scratch

Chicken Scratch
The one thing that turned me off to writing in the past was my terrible handwriting which my teachers had a difficulty reading and the one thing that turned me off to reading was standing in front of class which my teacher made me do and then reading a passage from book. I first remember getting negative comments about my handwriting as early as first grade, by that time I was already writing simple sentences, which I found to be good at. But everything began to change when my teacher checked my exercise book and to my surprise she couldn’t read what I wrote down. Instead of helping me to improve she started making comments and went around the class with my exercise book and asked each student if they could read it, guess what they couldn’t. I became as red as beet and felt embarrassed to the point that I did not speak to my teacher for days. After school I sat down in my room and with the exercise book in front of me I started rewriting on a separate paper what I previously wrote, over and over again, but it still looked just as in the exercise book. After few weeks my teacher gave up on me and never complained of my handwriting again. The next two school years were quite good for me, until fourth grade where another embarrassing problem came to life, reading in front of class. This was something new for me and as I soon discovered also created a bad feeling for reading. Every now and then I was called to the front of class to do a routine reading from our textbook. As I stood in front and looked at the heads looking at me, giggling amongst each others just waiting for me to make some kind of   mistake and make fun of me. I got stressed out and made stupid mistakes which made the whole class laugh, my face got red which just worsened the whole situation. Now those days are over but I still have the same disadvantages in my academic life as before the only difference is they are much smaller than before.