In the blog post, she talks about how learning to use Twitter was like learning to write all over again, just in a different way. That got me thinking about all the new, different types of literacies that social media and the internet brings people. It is not like the internet as a whole has its own language and its own “rules.” Each section of social media is like learning a different language all over again. Twitter has a specific literacy and method, and as does Facebook and Instagram. They are all different, and getting any new social media account is agreeing to learn a new language and a new set of conventions.

We are all taught how to write a five page essay or how to write a research paper. In some classes, we are taught how to write an op-ed article or a short story. Our sponsors for school-based literacy are our teachers and our parents. What I find interesting is that we teach ourselves the various languages of the online world. Acronyms and hashtags show up in our social media feed without warning, and we have to figure out what they mean. Or sometimes we look them up on urbandictionary. Our sponsors for online literacy are ourselves and our peers. We learn how to use the internet through trial and error and our friends showing us how. Each website has different uses, different things we are supposed to use them for and we figure out the rules on our own. Last year, my friend was on Facebook and commented how this one guy posted so many statuses that he “really needed to just get a Twitter.”

In the article, she says that for her first tweet, she did something wrong. I find it amazing that we really can do something wrong when we’re on social media, and people will notice. They will notice if you post something on one site that was meant for a different one, because people recognize the different purposes. Learning to use Twitter is like learning a new language, and so is learning to use Instagram, or YouTube, or Tumblr, or Vine.

Q: What stories did your parents tell you about their own efforts to learn to read and write?  What kinds of values did they place on reading and writing?

A: I don’t remember any stories about efforts to learn to read and write, but both were clearly very important to my parents.  Our house was filled with books ~ one of my mother’s greatest treasures was a very old volume (“Gerard’s Herbal”?) that my father had given her.  We (my brothers and sisters) were always given books as gifts on birthdays or Christmas.  It was always assumed that we would be readers and writers.

 

 

In the Hamilton article, I found the juxtaposition of Literacy as Accessory and Literacy as Defiance very interesting. Both of the explanations said that these two uses for literacy were about identity, about declaring something about oneself. The part that intrigued me and caught my attention was how, while they had that in common, it manifested in very different ways. It says that Literacy as Accessory is “images in which literacy signifies that a person has a particular status.” It’s using literacy as a way to establish or announce your position in society, using literacy to show off your status. By contrast, Literacy as Defiance is “images of oppositional literacy practices, such as graffiti, demonstrations and political protests.” This is a whole different type of declaration of identity. It is using literacy to show what you stand for or what you believe in, or using literacy to break laws. I find literacy as a form of identity fascinating- how it can be used to show who you are as a person or how you want to be perceived. It can be from what you tell people you’ve read or what you hide reading.

Which transitions well into talking about the photograph I brought in. I took this picture a few months ago. In the photo, there is a stack of books, but the only one for which the title and author are somewhat visible is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The other three books could be anything. Which begs the question, did I do that on purpose? Am I only willing to admit own that particular book out of the four? The Great Gatsby is a famous novel, highly acclaimed, used in English classes everywhere. The way this photo uses books is more Literacy as Accessory than anything else. It could be seen as an announcement of sorts: “Look, I read books, look what kind of books I read and be impressed.” Additionally, the focus of the photo is not on the books, but on the cat. So to add another layer, it could be interpreted as a casual brag, like a namedrop almost: “Oh, I read, but it’s not a big deal or anything, I’m not showing off, I just read enough for it to not be a big deal.”

I didn’t mean to analyze this photo in such a way that made me seem pretentious and show off-y. In reality, the books were stacked that way arbitrarily and I just wanted another picture of my cat. Look how cute she is.

Hello, everyone! My name is Charlotte Letellier. I am a sophomore here at Chico State. I was born and raised in Berkeley, California in a bilingual household. I have two sisters, one older and one younger. I went to a French American school for elementary and middle school, then I went to the high school where my mother teaches. Now I’m here at Chico. I entered as a Psychology major, sure I wanted to do that with my life. Then I changed my major to Theatre, slightly less sure but just knowing that I loved theatre and wanted to take acting classes. Now I am an English Literature major and I have less of an idea of what I want to do than ever before. I might like to be a teacher, though my public speaking skills could use some work. But enough about me, let’s talk about the school system.

Our conversation in class on Thursday got me thinking about a few things. Firstly, it got me thinking about the arbitrary decisions about what is and isn’t worthwhile academically. It got me thinking about what skills we think are important. My little sister is fourteen, and she is brilliant in many aspects. At school, she is in special ed and needs help in most subjects. When it comes to classwork, she has learned slower than other students. However, she can tell you anything you want to know about the Hunger Games series and she has extensive knowledge about all the characters in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. She could write essays about the characters and plots if she tried or wanted to. It makes me wonder if it is the classwork itself she has trouble with or the method of teaching this material. I wonder how she would do in a class that teaches her history in relation to the Hunger Games or mythology in relation to Percy Jackson.

I believe in making school available to everyone. I don’t believe in making it standardized for everyone. Everyone learns at different paces and in different ways, and it’s not fair to cater to one single type of student and leave the rest to struggle. It’ll work out fine for a student who may learn differently but whose parents have the resources and time to help out, by hiring a tutor or getting their child summer classes. This is not the case for everyone.