When this class first started I couldn’t help but think that it was going to be boring and forced, because if I’m honest that’s what 98.9% of my classes have felt like in the five years I’ve been doing this college thing. But it was actually the most interesting class I had all semester, I only missed one class. I didn’t even really understand that literacy went beyond reading and writing until now.

In the “Just Girls” group, I had the point really driven home that literacy was and is everything around us, all the time. It’s how we infer things about ourselves and others and the world that make a person literate. That doesn’t necessarily mean that because you can read and write you are literate. I think the most literate people are the people, like the tough cookies, who see that they have to over come small feats to get places in life. It’s about learning how to take in everything around you and comprehend that not everything is perfect or going to work out perfectly. And on the that thought, my make/hack/play group comes to mind. We really did try to make those little helicopter flying things to work, but they just didn’t. This group workshop taught me that literacy is about rolling with the punches and doing your best is all that you can do.

I think the best thing I will take away from this class was from Kim though. Her style of teaching, not with percentages and red pens and blah, blah, blah, made me as a student want to put in the effort it took to get full credit on things. I think when I know I can still get “some points” or “half credit” I don’t really care. I’ve semi-successfully manages five years of college with the least amount of effort possible and I only have two C’s on my entire transcript (math and science aren’t my jam), but I feel like that’s because most of the classes I’ve taken have been extremely “cookie-cutter.” There’s never any sense of play or investigation, and I got that in this class. So thanks.

These presentations have taught me a lot about learning through new literacies. They’ve taught me that literacy is much more than reading and writing, it’s learning to interact with the world around you and get from point A to point B. While doing the make, hack, play activity I realized you just have to go with what you’ve got. No, our project didn’t work out, but we worked together to get as far through it as we could. During the game activity, the two girls I worked with and I had to work together to make a game that made sense and was fun. It was super fun to do that and I keep wishing I had one of those special die that we used. In the fairytales activity, I learned to put a new spin on things old and tried. I had fun, I learned in a way I’m not used to learning. I’m not really a group person, and this was fun to work with a group and have it work out nice.

So far I’ve learned that pretty much anything and everything is a literacy, so why not music? and why not some of the most prevalent music in a young person’s life? Hip hip is everywhere. It’s on the radio and in commercials, it helps build a particular mood in particularly “hood” scene’s of a movie. Most people like some form of hip hop, so why not use it for good? This article: http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdigitalis.nwp.org%2Fresource%2F3400&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNERwm_llOLebCtSxT0U0MMPv4OjXg

shows local artists helping out in junior highs. Hip hop doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I think a lot of older people think all hip hop is bad. In our group was watched these videos “Rap Battles of History,” that while comedic are also semi helpful. Most of the lyrics rappers use have bigger meanings also. I constantly find myself needing to look up a new reference I don’t understand.

 

Junior high was scary, to say the least. I had the option to go to the junior high in the sixth grade and did. It was an awful decision or I don’t have a filter. One of the two, because I managed to piss off a bunch of eighth grade girls. That made life scary.

This book did bring back a lot of memories though, some good and some bad. The funniest part was how seriously my girlfriends took ourselves back then. It’s funny because I grew up a tough cookie parading as a social queen. I didn’t get to go on the sixth grade trip because I couldn’t afford it. My dad was a single dad and we barely made ends meet every month. In a suburb of LA, barely making it doesn’t cut it. If you can’t keep up, you get cut off. It was rough, but I made it through.

Finders study put junior high literacy practices into a whole new perspective for me. Not only was I like Lauren, inserting myself into everything because I wanted to be included, but my name is literally Lauren. But I felt for the tough cookies too. The part about them all sitting around at a lunch table while the rest of their classmates signed yearbooks was heartbreaking. I never gave a second thought to why people didn’t get yearbooks, but I knew a few that didn’t.

I think the purpose of this book was to shine light on how, even at a young age, people get stereotyped and it’s hard to break out of them. The social queens are a dime a dozen, but the cookies are who stood out for me. The way the teachers even suggested that they were the nicest girls, the ones teachers dream of, or something to that effect. The cookies of the word are typecast as the underdog. Nobody has to stay in their roles that their given, but sometimes that’s easier.

Like others, when I began this class I considered literacy to be the ability to read and write. These things we are taught from a young age are just the building blocks to literacy. Literacy is what we do to improve and to use these building blocks. It can be anything from a tweet or novel, a poem or a comic, heck, a t-shirt slogan. Literacy is what we do with a language to learn from it and produce new and bigger and better ideas.

I think a majority of Americans, I won’t speak for the world, think literacy is reading and writing and doing it at an accelerated level. But it’s not. Anyone and everyone is and can be literate. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself in a foreign countries framers market, but I’m sure there is some sort of system that helps everyone working it and attending it make it’s system move smoothly. I think literacy is a product of its environment, just like most other things in life. A lot of the world just has a narrow view of how literacy really works and grows within a community.