It's my first year on the middle school campus where we can read books, take the AR tests, a test on the book we read to receive grades points and get prizes such as colorful pencils, animal-shaped erasers or sticky hands. At this point, I'm reading at a 3rd grade level, at the minimum place teachers want a student to be. Because if I did, my mother still made me climb on her table and read out loud to her, my grandmother, and any customer who came through the front door looking for flowers. At 8 years old, I finish about 1 book a week but still struggle to pass all the tests, which was really frustrating because I barely won any of the prizes my friends were bragging about, and yet my heels remained buried in the ground without hesitating to stop. Later, when 3rd grade was over and Summer was here, I was still sitting at my mother's workstation reading to her and anyone who would listen. When I first started reading, my mother focused on the time I spent reading and how much, but she wasn't so focused on my understanding of the words or the story that was being told through them. So we made the change. Now I read fewer books but I understood the words and their meaning better. From the start of the school year, I took the AR tests and even surpassed my friends in AR