Blog 1 …

My names Chris and I’m a English Studies major in my senior year here at Chico State. I’m happy with my class schedule for the first time in a long time and I think I’m finally enjoying be a student. I don’t know what I’ll do with my degree after school but I suspect I’ll have to augment it with a master’s degree; maybe something along the lines of Crisis Management or perhaps a degree Administration of Education … I think the two are related fields. But if I don’t go after a masters then I’ll probably just give up on life and subject myself to OCS ‘cause I’s gots bills to pay and I think they (military) pay for your masters while you’re in.

I found my opinions on literacy reinforced by Szwed in The Ethnography of Literacy. I’ve discovered in English class after English class that there are two types of English student; the first type preoccupies themselves with the science of English and the second type preoccupies themselves with the Creation of English. The difference between the two is that the Science of English student will whoop your ass at scrabble and the Creator of English makes words sing and minds ring with constituted prose and anomalies… I fancy myself the latter. With that said, I can tell you that I found Szwed’s term literacy cycles (423) to be very revealing of my overall experiences because though my punctuation and grammar are abysmal I excel in my English studies despite this handicap as my strengths seem to be in composition, communication and rhetoric. Szwed identifies five elements of literacy, “text, context, function, participants, and motivation” (423) and that’s true, all of it is true to the overall point of his thesis that literacy needs to be better understood as it trends (422) and how it weaves itself through the social and cultural framework (423) so that educators can fulfill a community’s needs (429).