1. My Mom's Impact on My Education and Literacy By Jonathan Merritt

2. Early Influence Being the only child of a dedicated mother, whose motto throughout would be that “education is the most important thing”, an early emphasis was placed on education. This began with my Mom almost obsessively trying to teach me the alphabet probably before I even knew what she was saying. But seriously though, she would quiz me on it at the most random times and have me recite the song.

3. Reading Every Night Ever since I can remember, I have always enjoyed stories, ranging from my Mom reading to me every night to my Dad's bedtime stories, to my parents taking me to the children's plays. My parents read to me a lot, giving me a head start in reading, and developing my literacy skills from an early age

4. You're a Wizard, Jon By first grade, my Mom and I started reading the Harry Potter series together. We got to the third book until I started to read them on my own because she was slowing me down. Soon after, I had read them all multiple times. The Harry Potter series motivated me to read thousands of pages multiple times and introduced me to series reading. Once I got into reading book series, I read many different series and began to read for fun, further developing my reading skills and confidence

5. Being the Dedicated Mom she is, my Mom signed me up for Kumon, a program that helps kids get ahead in math and reading. This not only helped my reading, but my writing skills as well. As much as I hated doing worksheets like these back in the day, I'm glad my Mom fought me on it.

6. The Importance of Confidence In the Classroom Once things evolved beyond crayons, scissors, and glue sticks in elementary school, I soon began to feel like this kid. Because of my Mom's efforts, I wasn't frustrated by school. And as much as I would rather be home watching cartoon network, or how bad my teachers were, I felt confident when it came to the material we were learning

7. Why Not Getting Frustrated Is So Important I had my crying days in school, but it was never because I got frustrated in my academic abilities. Over the years, I've seen kids get frustrated and develop a mentality that "they are not smart" or that "they are not good at school". From what I have seen, this mentality is not easily reversed. Those that did develop this mentality, just seemed to give up sometimes in school. But not me. Thanks Mom.