VOS: a Very Old Story Once upon a time while I was setting with the family showing them my notebooks and my teachers’ sweet notes on them. I was boasting while showing my younger sisters the full marks in my writing notebook. My father noticed that and for some reason he wanted to limit me in a strange way so he said: “Do you know Alaa, When I was as young as you in the fourth grade I used to memorize my lessons by heart before going to school and there I used to read without looking in the book because I already had memorized everything at home!” I believed that and took it very seriously then innocently I spent the whole night practicing and trying to memorize next day’s reading lesson. On the next day at the reading class the teacher asked me to read saying “read Alaa!” The first thing I did was closing my book then reading from my memory. The only problem was: I started to make mistakes from the first sentence so my classmates started to laugh and my teacher said “Alaa! Why don’t you read from your book?” I was embarrassed but I became more embarrassed when I couldn’t read even when I had my book open! Even the laziest classmates were laughing at me at that point. When I went back home that day I was a bit frustrated, I told my father what happened, and asked him “did you really memorized all of your books when you were a primary school student?!” He laughed then he told me he was kidding me. The more sarcastic thing was he told the story to my uncles at one of the family meetings so I had to bear their laughs while they were saying “read Alaa!” which lasted for a not very short period of time Have you ever experienced anything similar? Looking forward to your corrections and feedback :)