Blog Number Five: Textbooks Glore!

Throughout the past several years, I have had the opportunity to take several advanced placement social studies classes such as AP US History and AP Euro that both demanded a rigorous amount of reading material to adequately prepare for the course. In order to achieve the grades I intended to show to my ever questioning parents, I would read nearly a chapter (about 25 pages) every other night to ace any pop quizzes, or "minor" tests the teachers slyly decided to throw at us. Before these classes added a fundamental source of homework in my life, I would occasionally read a book as a casual pastime. More to the point, these books that I read beforehand were minuscule in length compared to the size of 600 years of history painstakingly compressed into just under 1000 pages. No doubt the authors went ahead into publication without student approval. Yet after my first few months of AP Euro, I began to read gigantic novels on a whim after my reading time became comprised of wars and political scandals. It must have been my subconscious nudging me to absorb some other kind of information other than the century old activities of frumpy old men. Anyway, I now can assess that the reasons behind my new found interest in literature were the result of my increased talents in speed-reading, attentiveness, and endurance from reading page after page about American and European history. These new skills enabled me to hone my reading prowess to new heights in order to attempt such great classics as Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, and The Tale of Two Cities. Without a doubt, it would have never crossed my mind to read these collectibles a year before enrolling in AP Euro, but the sheer quantity of reading that went hand-in-hand with the course bolstered my confidence and patience enough to go out of my comfort zone to read books other than the first dystopia young adult novels that caught my eye at Barnes and Nobles. In effect, I believe that reading about the histories of 600 year old men gave me the courage to read about men and women only a few centuries (ok maybe 50) years old.
(why even bother trying to catch up...)