Blog 1: Lisa

I never know how to start these things without being intensely boring, but hey. I’m pretty good at boring. And dry sarcasm.

My name is Lisa Jenkins, English Education major, aka the married mama of three. My husband Eric graduated from CSUC in 2007 and is now an 8^th grade Algebra teacher. He’s kind of amazing.

I’ve always loved writing. I’ve always loved words—probably too much, as I tend to use a lot of them, ha. In my sophomore year, Mrs. Parker said she didn’t know what I was doing in a regular English class and recommended me for English 3 Honors the following year. Then she gave me an A on my essay on why I hated a particular book we read. I loved that woman.

During my very first year of college I met a girl who introduced me to a church. I joined, dropped out of school (the church isn’t exactly supportive of women in school and wanting to work), married my husband, had three kids, and officially resigned twelve years after my baptism. I also stopped writing. And reading…until my husband convinced me to read Harry Potter. A few years before we officially left, I went back to school. This December I will officially be the first in my family to graduate college and I’m pretty proud of that.

Literacy practices. I’m a Young Adult (YA) nerd. I want to say I’ve always been, but in high school I read stuff like V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange—controversial stuff like that. And Dean Koontz. Now I’m into John Green and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and ohmygod The Hunger Games and LGBTQ novels–books like that. I read them because I love them, for the escape they offer. I read them because I find (most of) them crazy smart and compelling and beautiful. I read them because they will be the books my students will be reading and connecting to, as well as my own kids. I read them because I feel like I missed out on a lot as a YA. I read them because my good friends read them and the community and excitement and fire is just so contagious and wonderful. To a degree, too, I don’t feel like I’m 31. It’s not that I hate “adult” books (oooh, no. not that kind. Unless it’s written well, winkwink). I actually loved Water for Elephants and I really want to read Night Circus and I’m sure there are others. I’m not against them. Contemporary books can be amazing, but YA books save the lives of kids who think they’re alone. They change the lives of kids who learn about others—all books do, though. Toni Morrison’s Beloved was one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to read (high school), but it changed the way I think about everything.

I also write YA. It feels like I always have. It’s a processing. It’s accessible. It’s unassuming. It’s fun. I also want to keep in contact with real-life YAs. I think it helps me remember what they’re going through, what they’re feeling, what they love. That’s important when you have kids of your own and students that age. But I also write (poetry as well) to figure out what I’m feeling. I write better than I speak. I always have. It slows down the hurricane of thoughts I often experience.

I find myself reading—or trying to read—more non-fiction books lately, too. I went through a Henry VIII thing after watching the Showtime series (SO GOOD). I have a bunch of English nerd books—read Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer. Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide is great, too. I’m pushing through The Believer’s Brain (it is great! Holy cow. It’s just a lot) and Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System. See, I want to be smart. It’s more difficult for me to get through most non-fiction. I prefer if they’re written more casually. I also subscribe to Time magazine to keep up with what’s going on, blogs (“The Bloggess”), anything for a laugh, and so on. My boy and I are reading Judy Blume’s Superfudge at the moment.

I read and write for so many reasons. To process my new belief system. To learn about the past. To learn about others. To hopefully be a smart English teacher. To be able to hold my own in a debate because I really, really like debating. And because I really enjoy the company I often find myself in.

Obviously it’s so much more than the ability to read and write and even more than if people do. It’s what and how and when and why. In reading Szwed, I had more “I’ve never thought about it that way” and “I should’ve already thought about it that way” moments than anything else. I loved how he defined literacy and discussed contexts and didn’t dismiss any one kind of literacy. I fell in love with his statement that we “do not know what reading and writing are for in the lives and futures of [our] students” (422). That schools don’t even think about this because we all think we know better, because we don’t think outside the context of the classroom—or even outside the context of our own bubbles. That numbers mean nothing. That we don’t know or even consider what kids (or anyone else) read in their private lives versus their public lives.

There was at least one point that confused me a little. I remember when, in my very first year of college English, my professor broke some grammar/writing rule. A classmate called him out on it, and my professor simply said “I know the rules, so I can break them.” I was thrilled and have found myself repeating it to others. I hate most writing rules because breaking them sends its own message. It’s the manipulation of words I’ve always loved. Rhetoric. So what does Szwed mean when he says “It is not only the assumption of a single standard that we must question, but also the assumption of a single, proper learning progression, such that one can only ‘violate’ the rules when one has mastered them…” and so on (426-27). Is it that we assume that people can’t break the rules even if they haven’t mastered them, that they have no idea, no control over what they are saying from a rhetorical point of view? Like with “Ebonics”? And call them illiterate? Like when he says “We must come to terms with the lives of people without patronizing them or falling into what can become a sociology of pathos”?

I’d love to discuss what this can mean for a classroom. Perhaps by having the kids study others’ writings and analyzing their styles and what message they are sending, or annotating their own writing so that we, as their teachers, can follow their thought process? Asking them straight away what they read/write and why they read/write without judgment, why others they know do the same? Asking them what they thought of an author’s assertion of who they are and where they come from (the “outsiders” point of view—for example, The Help)?

Reading Szwed’s article has made me really excited about this class and thinking about literacy in more complex and non-judgmental terms. As always, I’m also now fighting the urge to want to be an ethnographer. See? Nerd.