Up until now, literacy has always been very black and white.  If you were literate, you could read or write.  If you were illiterate, you could not.  Now, I understand that it is deeper than that.  It is a matter of what considered a literacy practice.  Because of course, something I had never thought about before, is the fact that everything written is literacy.  Functional literacy was something I had never considered before.  The idea that those people who do not necessarily read “well” by conventional standards are still able to function in a society.  A person who does not read novels still understands that a stop sign means “stop” or that bread can be found on the aisle with the number one over it.

Yes, the class was helpful in terms of considering literacy for future teaching practices.  But when I signed up for the class, I was an English Education Major.  Now, I am considering higher education as a goal, so I am only a lowly English Studies Major.  The difference is that I no longer see lesson plans in my future.  I see stubborn college kids and eager writers.  So while this class was interesting because it brought up ideas of different methods of teaching, it was also very helpful in getting me to understand why my elementary school had it all wrong.

Take sponsorship for example.  Even while discussing the concept in class, it took me a bit to understand that sponsors were not only the people who encouraged you to read, but possibly the people who were detrimental to my learning.  Well that opened a whole new can of worms.  I was never encouraged to read in school.  I wasn’t necessarily discouraged until in sixth grade, when they decided I had a relatively low reading score because of a star test I took fifth grade- notice that that was the first year I was in pseudo-foster care and being told that my mother was going to die just about any day now.  But up until then I wasn’t really discouraged, I was just never really encouraged.  My school tried a few halfhearted attempts at games and races to see who could read the most at home or get through the most books or what have you.  At home, on the other hand, my father was reading to us from Tolkien, Rowling, Carrol, and Lewis (although at the time I was convinced his name was See-Us-Loo-us).  I didn’t think of reading in terms of a fun pastime, but just something that we did, typically with my father.  When I think of later, when I started wanting to reread the stories my father had read to me when I was little, teachers began telling me that I couldn’t read them because they were just too advanced for me.  Its only now, after taking this class, that I realize why I did not become a big reader or studier in school.  What is a child supposed to think when they find out that the books they have already read are too advanced for them? Well this child thought that if books I had already read were too advanced, then the books I hadn’t yet read were pretty much Everest.  Unclimbable.

I want to spend some more time talking about my father and how he used to read to us when we were little.  I say that he read to us and maybe you envision us sitting on his lap in a big arm chair in a big living room surrounded by warmth and love.  Really, my father lived in a one bedroom duplex in the country that always smelled like mildew, firewood, and something distinctly that house.  There was no armchair, no big squishy beds, no heaps of stuffed animals.  We visited on the weekends and slept on camp beds and a big rollout futon.  When he sat us down for a bedtime story, we picked one off the shelf, he put on a headlamp and turned out the lights.  Then he read to us, stories from Aesops Fables, Travels of the Fox, James Herriot, or, as I mentioned earlier, something he wanted to read like JRR Tolkien or Ulysses.  The he read to us for half an hour or so, using a voice he reserved for reading to us.  He made up voices and accents for the characters and breathed life into these stories.  Once, when we were put into foster care, he recorded a few stories for us on cassette tapes so that he could read to us even when we weren’t with him.

I think my takeaway for this class is the idea that you can’t encourage a child too much.  Adolescence is a tough time, but imagine it without characters like Judy Bloom, Harry Potter, Anne Frank, and The Outsiders to relate to.  Imagine childhood without Owl in Love and Woman in the Wall to teach young girls about becoming a woman.  Imagine a life without Shakespeare.  I guess you can thank Wishbone for introducing me to Shakespeare and Cyrano before the age of eight.

I think the most important thing I’ll take away from this class is the idea that literacy isn’t just reading a writing.  Its weird saying that even now, even after I’ve been pounding this idea into my brain for the last three months, but that’s really what this class has taught me.  As a reader, thinking that there are people who genuinely don’t like reading astounds me.  But it’s true.  And those people aren’t illiterate.  It isn’t necessarily that they can’t read, just that they don’t like to.

Also, learning literacy isn’t easy.  We talk about reading like it is something innate, but we forget how hard it was to learn.  Really, it took us three years, from kindergarten to second grade.  We didn’t jump straight into reading the newspaper.  We had to look at the pictures in the funnies first, then we had to be able to read the funnies, and then we might have moved on to advertisements with big letters we could run tiny fingers under.  But yet people talk about learning to read as if it is something that can be taught overnight, something that can be summarized into a single document.  And after taking this class and realizing how many documents there are, I know that this idea is a fallacy.  How do you define literacy, which is a word as versatile as “love” or “hate?”  How do you define an idea that is by definition lose and undefined?  Answer: maybe you can’t, and maybe you shouldn’t, because maybe the definition for everyone is just a little bit different.

My first thought, after reading Moje’s article about Adolescent Literacy, was to wonder whether technology has changed so much in such a short time.  Though the article was written in 2008, it seems as if these five years have changed drastically when it comes to digital literacy.  A conversation between a young girl, Valerie, and her interviewer shows that she rarely uses the internet.  When she does, she says that she does not usually “play,” but rather, uses it (the internet) to “take information out.”

Of course, I am not an eleven year old girl in an underdevoped neighborhood suffereing in an underperforming school, but I use my computer frequently throughout the day.  I definitely use it to play.  I probably play on my computer more than I do anything else.  I don’t play games, but I do surf through comic sites like Tickld, sift through garbage on Youtube, and spend more time than I would really like to admit to on Facebook.  I’m not a twitter person, but I use it on occasion, usually when I’m bored of my other sites.

But moving past the technological changes that have happened over the last several years, I am reminded of the Gender and Literacy article group presentation.  Some girls interviewed are involved in a book club.  They share books, vote on books, discuss books.  The girl in the interview mentions a book they read called “The Skin I’m In.”  Curious, I looked up the book on Amazon.  It is a coming of age novel about a girl who has spent the last two years caring for her despondent mother, struggling through school in an underprivileged area.

When a boy is asked if he tells his friends about books he likes, he responds “Yeah, kind of; like when we go to the library and I tell them about joke books or books they might like to read.”  He does not mention any specific titles, just “joke books or books they might like.”  Whether because he is enduring the social construct that reading is something girls like to do rather than boys, or simply because he doesn’t read as much, his response can be taken to mean that he doesn’t share books the same way that the girls do.

The most important thing I learned in from the presentation was the vast difference between the way genders learn. Now, it all seems so obvious.  Of course boys and girls are different.  We’re different in more ways than just learning, so of course learning would be apart of it.  Its not that I didn’t know, and more that I didn’t think about it before.  It just wasn’t a topic that came into my head.  It had never crossed my mind that boys might learn different than girls, especially at a young age.  It makes sense of course, thinking back to my grade school days when boys would get distracted halfway through presentations and begin throwing things, while girls were (not always) focused on what was in front of them.

When I think about girls and boys in an educational atmosphere, I think of girls in groups talking about what they read, and boys as talking about what they did.  As a child, I remember only two classmates who were boys (twins) who read frequently- so frequently that they were rarely paying attention to the lecture, their noses dug into Animorphs, Harry Potter, and anything else that passed through our small library.  The problem was that these two boys were ridiculed for it.  The idea that they would rather be reading than playing at recess or enjoying in free time activities was something that we, as a class, were unable to get over.  I wouldn’t say that I made fun of them; I was part of a group of slightly nerdy girls.  We read a lot and played games based on what we had read.  I did think it was odd how much the Viacillo twins read, but I didn’t hold it against them in the way that my classmates did.  They were ostracized from the other boys and were given even fewer opportunities to participate in recess activities, which made them read more, which in turn led to more bullying, thus perpetuating the cycle.  I would say something about the girls ostracizing them, but in third grade girls and boys at my school just didn’t play with each other, and the Viacillo twins had somewhat less than perfect hygene.  Other than that, I can’t remember any reason why we (the girls) didn’t play with them.  It was actually just because they smelled bad.  Really bad.

I imagine now that single gender schools would benefit from same sex teachers, at least in subjects such as History, English, and science, where deep focus on literature and reading is emphasized.

I honestly can’t tell you if I used Accelerated Reader when I was young.  If I did, it was only in the seventh grade, and only ever really as a side thought.  Many teachers now require reading daily, twenty minutes written in a log and signed off on by the parent.

I’m trying to think of a worse way to get kids to ENJOY reading.  Because really, what is the purpose of teaching reading if not to help them enjoy it.  The problem I can see developing with this sort of system is that kids tend to do whatever you tell them not to do, and refuse to do whatever you tell them they have to do.  I imagine if you told kids that junk food was good for them and they needed to eat more of it that they would suddenly become obsessed with broccoli.  Incidentally, my niece’s favorite food is broccoli.  She calls them “tree veggies.”

So I imagine that the same sort of thing happens with reading.  I know that when I was in first grade, we had a sort of reading race.  Every day, we had to log what we read at home and have it signed off by our parents.  Then, because it was football season, the teachers designed a bulletin board to look like a football field.  Each student’s name was written on a football shaped card with velcro on the back.  Each day, depending on how much that student had read, the football moved forward across the field.  Although I think I probably read as much as the other students in my class, my football only moved about three inches on that board because of how infrequently I had my mom sign off on my reading.  I just didn’t tell her.  I don’t know that I even told her about the assignment.  I honestly can’t remember turning in any reading hours, but as I’m pretty sure I would have remembered my fierce Mrs. Thompson reprimanding me for not doing my work, I must have turned in something.

The problem was, I didn’t want to do my homework.  I didn’t mind reading, but once it became homework, I hated it.  In junior high school, we had something similar to Accelerated Reader.  It was a program on which we were tested on the books we had read anyway.  We didn’t earn points for the tests, though, we earned a reading level and a pass fail grade on the tests we took.  Our options were to take the tests or write a short blurb about the book answering certain questions.  I opted to take the tests.  I only did it, however, to “improve” my reading level scores.  If it weren’t for that program, I would have been required to read books far below my reading level all through junior high school.  Once they noticed that I had a consistent reading level of above eleventh grade, they stopped trying to get me to read sixth grade level books.

I don’t know if AR works.  I haven’t seen it in action.  I know that there seems to be two sides to the spectrum, though.  Parents and teachers either hate it or love it.  My sister, who is a teacher, finds it effective in her classes.  I think if used properly it can be effective.  If it is used like we used it in my junior high, maybe it can be effective.  Students who can utilize it so that it is effective can use it, and students who struggle with it, or who find it to be unhelpful, could have a different assignment   It might need to be decided on a by-class basis.

Literacy in my family… is sort of like breathing and eating in other families.  We didn’t always have everything we needed.  I went to school in dirty clothes more times that I can possibly count, and more than one night I went hungry, or had no where to go.  All things considered, it surprising that my family had clean clothes and food as often as we did.  But we always had books.  When I was young I had stacks of Mercer Meyer Critters books, The Bearnstein Bears, Clifford, and Spot.  We had animated bibles and CS Lewis stories.  Every night I stayed with my father, he read to us from whatever he had.  Sometimes from children’s books, sometimes from The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, and even a few times from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy.  With stories for us, it was less about reading and more about the stories.  My father made voices for all of the characters and put on accents each time he read to us from James Herriot.

But that’s not what I want to talk about in this blog, because my own literacy is so known to me, and probably to you.  There was nothing especially great about my childhood when it came to books.  We read when we could and we were read to when there was someone there to read to us.  Our teachers encouraged us to read while simultaneously telling us we were “allowed” to read and what we weren’t.  My story is so much like everyone else’s, that there doesn’t seem to be much point in telling you about it.  My grandmother’s story, however, is something truly unique.  Since I was sick, and unable to turn this blog in on time, I went the extra mile and decided to find out everything she remembered about her literacy practices when she was young, when her children were young, and finally when my sisters and I were young.

During out talk, we went through each generation, beginning with her when she was young.  Marsha was five years old when she went to first grade.  There was no kindergarten in her small country town, so she went straight to first grade, and she couldn’t read at all.  Strange to think of a first grader who can’t read when children are often expected to enter kindergarten nowadays and already know the basics.  Regardless, it didn’t take her long to learn.  By the time she was entering second grade, she was able to read more than just the basics, and was already progressing to children’s books.  Every sunday, she would lay on the floor of the living room with the comic page of the newspaper, reading Dagwood and Blondie, and any others that she was able to decipher.  A bad ear infection during the summer between first and second grades put her in the hospital, and her parents came to her in the hospital with two new books, one for her sister, and one for her.  There was a poetry book by Robert Louis Stevenson, and also an illustrated bible.  Though she was excited about it, she was not  yet able to read at such an advanced level.  Thus, upon her release from hospital, a tradition began in their household.  Every night, her parents would read her and her sister one bible story and one poem.  When they would reach the end of the book, they simply started over again until they had read the illustrated bible three times through.  She was then given a copy of the new testament which her parents began reading to her.

Unfortunately, at this point the war was getting started.  That christmas, they were given a collection of around a dozen anthologies containing segments and excerpts from classical literature grouped together by genres.  Fantasy, Mystery, Adventure, and Schools Days, with pieces from books such as Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.  She was put into the advanced reading class for the duration of the year, but life was about to get much more tumultous for the family.

During what would have been the spring of her second grade year, her father joined the army and they made a harsh transition to Texas on a train ride that lasted seven days from California.  Neither she, nor her sisters had anything but clothing with them, not even toys, let alone reading material.  For the time, the two sisters old enough to be in school were given light home schooling by their mother.  She occasionally gave them arithmetic problems or spelling sheets, and Marsha was given a Websters dictionary.  They jumped in and out of schools for the next year and a half as they traveled from Texas to Illinois to Nebraska, mostly reciving only the “light home schooling” that her mother was able to give them.

Upon their arrival home, my Great Great Grandmother, and her grandmother Nani, had managed to collect three cardboard boxes filled with books from her job at The Goodwill Store.  The boxes had everything, from classics to little unheard of mystery collections to Louisa May Alcott, they were the true beginning of her library.  And she loved them.  She read them all indiscriminately with no taste whatsoever.  If she could read it, she loved it and she gobbled them up by the pageful.  Even to this day she remembers that there was a great deal of literature she read from those boxes that was highly inappropriate for an eight year old girl.  But that didn’t stop her.

By the time she was entering third grade, her school had placed her in a sixth grade level reading class, and first grade level penmanship class.  A life dedicated to reading had begun, and there was no stopping her.

She only had one thing to say about raising children and introducing literature to them.  Her children were all relatively strong readers, there was never any problem with that.  She read to them a bit, and every christmas she bought them a few more books for their collection, but they never had much in the way of money. Then one year, their television broke.  Without the money to get it fixed, they began a new tradition of sitting in my mother’s room with my aunt on the bed across from my mom, their brother on the floor in the middle, and my grandmother in a rocking chair in front of him.  And she would read them anything they could find.  Bambi, Little Women, Little Men, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, poetry, anything and everything and she loved it.  Every night David would fall asleep on the carpet and the three of them, my grandmother and her two daughters, would have to lug him back into his own bedroom, as he weighed about as much as the three of them combined.  They kept the tradition up for a year and half, until my grandfather got their television fixed, and the tradition died.  It was, she claims, her greatest failing.  She wishes she had never fixed that stupid television.

(I have tried to describe this as closely as my grandmother described it to me.  Somehow, it seems important that it is in her voice.)