For my interview, I decided to interview two family members, my grandpa and my mom. The reason I decided to interview both of them was because, after I talked with my grandpa, I thought it would be interesting to interview my mom to see how much literacy had changed between their generations. I found it interesting to see how much education had changed between the almost 30 years difference in school attendance between the two, one addition being kindergarten. While I don’t know the specifics of what or how each of them learned different concepts, it was evident that reading and writing skills were taught first thing when entering school due to the importance of these concepts to successfully move on through school. The two had different family backgrounds, which influenced their ability to learn to read and write, my grandpa having a less involved family due to circumstances with the war and his mom having to be a single parent and work until his dad returned, and my mom had an involved family, with her mom reading to her and having older siblings as role models. Due to the lack of attention at home, this may have been a reason why my grandpa struggled with learning to read and write, while my mom found it easy to read and write. Early engagement of reading is crucial to their concept of understanding how to read and write as we have learned from research throughout time. I liked getting to know more about my family’s upbringings and background more too.

One of the comments I found most interesting in the reading was “Literacy is not a necessity for personal survival”. I found this interesting for (mainly) two reasons. One, I don’t know if I agree or disagree with it. No, technically we do not need literacy to survive, but it sure does make life more enjoyable and liveable. As we found out in the reading, there are areas, such as Vai, that count literacy as being able to memorize and pass on ancestors stories and be the family “book keeper” by knowing dates and such. And that duty is generally designated to one person, meaning the rest of the population does not know how to read or write. So, the case study provided in the article helps us realize that we do not in fact need literacy to survive, technically.

The other reason I found this quote interesting is that, in Western culture at least, I kind of feel that we do need it to survive. As we all seemed to realize more than we were aware of, we read and write on a daily basis for pretty much everything we do: we read road signs, paper work, assignments, shopping lists, social media and texting, to name a few. For writing: typing, taking notes, writing a shopping list, texting, communicating on social media outlets. We read and write all day, every day. In western culture, and as stated in the article, “the single most compelling fact about literacy is that it is a social achievement”. Humans need to have sociability, leading to literacy, in their lives or we go crazy. Think of Tom Hanks in Cast Away and what a lack of communication did to him. While I can agree that we don’t need it for basic survival, it has definitely made our lives easier to live and created a literate, social, and safe world for us to live in.

 

Greetings fellow class mates! My name is Teri Snow. I am an English Ed. major and a music minor. I am a Senior this year, graduating next spring, and will be continuing my education in the credential program here at Chico State. I intend to obtain my Single, Special Ed., Masters, and possibly Multiple Subject credentials. I am really excited to be coming to the end of a long school career and look forward to teaching my own class some day in the near future.

I am from Corning, which is a little speck of a town about 30 minutes from Chico, where I also grew up. I am the middle child of seven kids in my family. When I’m studying like a mad woman for school or doing homework, I love hanging out with family, friends, and my boyfriend. I also love getting outdoors, hiking, walking, going for bike rides, reading, hanging out at upper/lower Bidwell park. I am a very social person and love being around/meeting new people, so don’t be afraid to say hello.

Reading response: I never really thought about how much we read everyday, signs, texts, paper work, etc. I guess I always pictured “reading” as personal reading for pleasure. We really are surrounded by literature in every aspect of our every day lives. Same thing with reading; we write lists, notes, texts, social media posts, etc. Again, I don’t think people realize how much literacy is part of everything we do. Both forms of literacy are important forms of communication. For me, these forms of literacy help me relax, remember, organize, and communicate with my coworkers. I found the Szwed reading interesting because he was pointing out that literacy is more than simply just reading and/or writing. It’s a set of skills that vary for every person and has layers to the elements of literacy. I don’t know if this information is necessarily new to me, but it’s something I hadn’t really thought about in the way he discussed, so I liked the points he brought up that made me think “oh yeah, I didn’t realize that”. For example, I liked his quote stating “Educators often assume that reading and writing form a single standard set of skills to be acquired and used as a whole by individuals who acquire them in a progression of steps…these skills are distributed across a variety of people”. He brings up a good point about authors not being the only ones who do the work; there is a whole team of people that collaborate to come up with the final production. Even though that’s something I knew, it just kind of made me think about how true that is. Every great piece of work has gone through multiple editing rounds.