Katie Woodward
Engl332
September 13, 2015

 

Alexa Woodward (my cousin)

 

 

• Try to think of your earliest memories of writing and reading.  What do you remember of reading and writing before you began school?  Who helped you with it and what was that like?

 

My mother placed a high value on literacy, and began reading to my siblings and I at a very young age. I was also encouraged to practice my penmanship, tracing and copying letters and numbers. I began school when I was four, and stayed in the dependent study program until I graduated in 2012.

 

 

• When you were growing up, how much school reading and school writing was done with computers?  What kinds of things did you do?  What values did your teachers place on computer literacy?

 

Very little work was done using computers until I began taking college classes in 2009. Prior to that, my reading was from textbooks and library books, and my essays and other assignments were written on paper. Computer literacy came when I had to learn to navigate Butte College’s Blackboard system. My charter school put little emphasis on computer literacy, and was more interested in having students learn proper grammar, rhetoric, and writing styles. In the era of technology, it was assumed that we could easily figure out how to use electronics, and for my peers and I, that was true.

 

 

• What are you asked to do with reading and writing at this point in your life?

 

I have completed all of the English classes required for my major (Cellular and Molecular Biology), and not much was expected of me, even in the “writing intensive” classes. Recently, I honed my skill is literature research with my honors thesis entitled “Medical Ethics in Critical Care”, that resulted in a 40-page dissertation with 57 references and two appendices. I have been applying to medical schools, and have been writing dozens of essays in response to their questions.

 

I interviewed my cousin, Alexa, who is currently working on completing her last semester at Chico State. She is nineteen-years-old and already sending out applications to multiple medical schools around the country. Basically she is Super Woman and has made me look bad at all family events throughout my entire life. In talking to her and going through the questions with her it was interesting because we quickly realized that our dads (they are brothers)  raised us with the same emphasis on reading and writing. We grew up being read the same favorite kid books like, “Ferdinand the Bull”, and we both went on to excel in writing. Even though we took drastically different paths in writing. She loves her science which is hard for me to keep up with and I love my creative short stories that have been read by a select few.