Abby Ott – Page 2 – English 332

Another Literacy Narrative

By Abby Ott | February 8, 2015

Although the assignment recommended that we interview an older or younger person, I decided to ignore this suggestion and interview my husband, Ben. I did this because in addition to the fact that he is my favorite person, Ben has actually had a kind of weird and super interesting life. Even though he and I are the same age (25) and grew up in the same hometown, our lifelong literacy experiences are almost totally opposite of one another.

One of the areas in which Ben’s experiences were the most different from many other people our age was in the area of computer literacy. His dad, a Vietnam veteran who battled PTSD, OCD and other mental and emotional difficulties, had some strong opinions about computers which created a unique experience for Ben and his siblings. When I asked him what sort of value his parents placed on computer literacy, he snorted:

“Ha…Yeah. Computers were definitely discouraged by my dad. I remember there was a program through the charter school and they gave our family a free computer for our house. I think they gave it to us so we could use it for research and homework and stuff, but my dad wouldn’t let us get internet, so it turned out there wasn’t a lot we could do with it.”

When I asked why his dad wouldn’t let them get internet, Ben hesitated before answering: “Because computers were…I don’t remember, but it was something totally crazy, like they were the Mark of the Beast or something. For real! It was like the internet was Skynet from The Terminator movies. He thought we were going to become dependent on them or…something about the government spying on us through the computers and knowing where we were and stuff. So we were really only able to use Word and stuff on our computer at home. I’d never had internet before, so at first I didn’t really know the difference. But it was kind of a bummer that we really never used the computer to its full capacity.”

I asked Ben how this lack of internet affected him in school. He recalled that once he got to high school, he and his sisters “had to walk 3 miles down Greenhorn Road [a narrow, windy mountain road with no sidewalk or bike lane] to our neighbor’s house to use a computer for school assignments. It was really a pain. I was pretty mad at our dad that he would let us walk that far but wouldn’t just let us get internet.”

When Ben was a junior in high school, his parents divorced, and he and two of his sisters temporarily went to live with a family friend named Pam. It was there, at age 16, that Ben finally had the internet at his disposal. “It was so awesome to just be able to do homework in my room”, he told me. “We actually had our own computer and dial-up line just for the kids. I learned how to use instant messenger and MySpace, and because of that I started writing more. I remember specifically that that was the first time I really learned how to type, because I was using IM to talk to my friends. It made me learn to type a lot faster.”

Facebook Fails

By Abby Ott | February 2, 2015

While the language of Mary Hamilton’s article was pretty dry and academic, I found the information to be really helpful in figuring out how to choose and analyze an image of a literacy event. Even though we’ve already kind of discussed this in class, I appreciated the way that Hamilton went out of her way at the beginning of the article to clarify that modern literacy studies have more to do with social practice and institutions with embedded literacy than with simple reading and writing. I’m one of the people who had no idea what “literacy studies” even meant when I enrolled in this class, so I am still getting used to thinking of literacy studies in this way!

The image that I chose to analyse for this assignment is a screenshot that I took of a web page entitled “Facebook Fails”. Just like many other similar sites, this Tumblr is devoted to posting stupid things that other people write on Facebook, and creating a platform for people to make fun of them. It’s pretty difficult to read the original post in this picture, but if you click on it you should be able to make it bigger!

There are obviously two layers to this literacy event: the original post, which is a bio from a Facebook page, and the fact that this piece of text has been re-posted with accompanying judgmental commentary onto the Facebook Fails Tumblr. This puts it into the category of “Interactions between people and texts” from the article. Other than this, though, I don’t feel like this literacy event fits very comfortably into any of the other literacy types mentioned in Hamilton’s article. The act of belittling another person’s perceived literary ability or intelligence might be categorized as a sort of “Literacy as Display” – one could assume that the person making fun of the original text is making a statement about their own literacy abilities by mocking and distancing themselves from the original post. But this would be a stretch from Hamilton’s definition of “Literacy as Display”, which she describes in the article as having more to do with words and logos that create a group identity. Perhaps this event could be labelled something like “Literacy as Status Determiner” or “Literacy as Social Filter”. I’m not particularly satisfied with either of these titles, but I’m trying to get at something which encapsulates the way that people can infer what “type of person” someone is based upon their writing style and perceived ability or intelligence. (As in the case of the commenter in the image, who writes “Your bio is so informative and intelligent. I can honestly say I hate you.”) I would be interested to hear what others think about this image. What kind of title do you think we could put on it that would help us understand what is going on here?

And so it begins…

By Abby Ott | January 24, 2015

Hello everyone! My name is Abby, and I am an English Ed major with just one semester left before graduation! I’m 25 years old, and somewhat recently returned to school (3 semesters ago) after a four-year hiatus from school. I completed my general ed at Sierra College right after high school, but I had approximately zero life direction or career ambition at the time. So after attaining my AA in Liberal Arts, I ditched school to backpack in New Zealand for 3 months, spent some time living at a camp and working as an outdoor activities instructor, and met this really awesome guy named Ben, who ended up asking me to marry him ;) We moved to Chico in 2011 so he could finish his degree in Mechanical Engineering, with the intent to move home to Grass Valley as soon as he graduated…but somewhere along the line, I discovered my passion for teaching and decided to go back to school, too! So that’s basically the story. When I’m not at school, you’ll find me working at TBar (basically my second home), running in Bidwell Park, escaping to the mountains for the weekend, or cooking something delicious and totally terrible for me.

I’m excited for this class because I’m really passionate about out-of-the-box teaching methods, and I’m looking forward to gathering more knowledge which will help me reach out to the less-than-stoked students in my future classes and help them to succeed. While there were several really interesting, new-to-me ideas in the Szwed article, one of my favorite moments was found on page 423: “The definitions of reading and writing, then, must include social context and function as well as the reader and the text of what is being written.” I love that Swed is concerned with social context and functional use with regard to the teaching of reading and writing. My math-brained engineer husband tells me that English classes always felt pointless to him, mostly because they read and wrote things that he was not interested in and which did not seem to carry any actual, practical life application. One of my passions as a future teacher is to construct a class that teaches reading and writing outside the context of classic literature, in an attempt to teach skills that will be interesting and actually apply to the lives of my non-English-loving students.

Also, I was pleasantly challenged by Szwed’s explanation of literacy as “not a single level of literacy, on a single continuum from reader to non-reader, but a variety of configurations of literacy”. I guess I have always kind of imagined literacy as a continuum, but I really like the notion that there are different “configurations” of literacy which are all equally valid. I hope that, as a teacher, I will be able to recognize the different configurations of literacy present in my students, and draw upon them to create a curriculum that will intersect with their interests and talents.

What Counts as Literacy?

Reading together

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Author: Abby Ott