Awakened by Words
I didn’t always enjoy reading. In fact, when I was little, I apparently despised it. My mom used to tell me about how she would try desperately to read with me to no avail. I wouldn’t sit still and worse yet, I struggled reading. My mom would ask “Randee, can you say ‘dog’ with mommy?” Silence. Then she would sound each letter out to help me. “D - O - G. Dog. You can do it.” I would just stare back at her with wide, anxious eyes. She would try again, pleading for me to say easy three letter words, but the result didn’t change. While I learned to speak, read, and eventually spell, I still didn’t like reading. Not until seventh grade.
I was homeschooled for most of K–12 — a decision that shaped me in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.
In seventh grade, my mom enrolled me in a co-op literature class, which is basically a group of homeschoolers coming together in a single classroom to be taught by a selected teacher. What mattered about this co-op literature class was my teacher - Ms. Gale Keef. I remember sitting in her class like it was yesterday. I was the youngest student in the class. Most of the other kids were actually in high school grades, but Ms. Keef didn’t teach or treat me any differently than the rest. I was expected to read the same books, write the same essays, and perform at the same level. Little did I know at the time, that class was going to change my perspective on reading forever.
Among the books we read that year were:
“Animal Farm” by George Orwell
“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
“To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
“Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Indian Captive” by Lois Lenski
They were demanding, layered, and far beyond what I thought I was capable of. But we weren’t just assigned these books to read. Ms. Keef taught me how to understand what I read, how to annotate a book, how to dive deeper into the real meaning behind each author’s words. She taught me how to transport myself into the story instead of just reading words off a page. While I knew how to read, I had never appreciated the power of words until then. And so my love for literature awoke. I had Ms. Keef for two years and read more books in those two years than I had in my whole life to date. I went from the child who couldn’t sit through the reading of a fairy tale to an adolescent who would sit in her room all day just to learn the ending of her latest book. I started asking to go to the bookstore, picking out my own books, taking my literary education into my own hands, and I’ve never looked back. While I thanked Ms. Keef at the end of our time together for the new immense joy she helped me uncover, I could never thank her enough for leaving a lasting impression that changed the trajectory of my life.
What I didn’t realize then was that learning to love books wasn’t just about stories — it was about independence. Once you understand how powerful words are, you start to understand why access to them has always mattered.
Books contain knowledge, lessons, wisdom, history, art. They outlive generations. They hold a key to the past while also shining a light on the future. The truth is literature is underrated. Throughout history, those in power have tried to control what people are allowed to read — because literacy creates independence. Books hold power that many haven’t learned to appreciate, and history is chock-full of lessons about it.
One of the neatest pieces of history that I learned in elementary school was about the Old Deluder Satan Act. In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed what became known as the Old Deluder Satan Act — one of the earliest laws in colonial America mandating public education. The sole purpose behind the Old Deluder Satan Act was to ensure children learned how to read and write so that they could read the Bible for themselves - to prevent people from being deluded by Satan for not knowing the Scripture themselves (Matthew 4:1-11). In old England, before the Pilgrims came to America, only certain “qualified” clergy could read the Bible. Knowledge of the Scripture was restricted to a select few, while the rest of the population had to blindly rely on those select few to not only share the Scripture with them but also to tell them the truth about it without any oversight.
The Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom - to build a life where they did not have to rely on a select few (a few that were not even selected by the general population) to tell them what to believe. This country was predicated on the Pilgrim’s journey for personal knowledge and truth.
I once stared silently at the word “dog,” unable to sound it out. Now I understand that words are not just sounds — they are gateways.
They shape nations.
They challenge authority.
They preserve truth.
And sometimes, they change the trajectory of a little girl’s life.