While reading Brandt’s Accumulating Literacy; i can’t stop thinking of Pac Man. Enter onomatopoeia here; wonka wonka wonka….Pac Man is going down the maze of life accumulating points with every move of the toggle. wonka wonka wonka…There are walls that direct him to score but in the end it is Pac Man that gets to chose which way he goes.  Yes, there is the chance of dying, being swallowed whole by the enemy, “the organized sytem” but with skill, intellect and motivation I, Pac Man, can achive to lifes highest ability, accumulating points or for this metaphor; literacy.  This is why i have to disagree with Brandt when he says, “This is what is so politically disenfranchising about present-day illiteracy: one’s world is almost totally organized by a system in which one can have no real say “(Brandt 652). Yes, one’s world is organized by a system, but not “totally” where one can have no real say. Yes the sytstem puts up road blocks but that is life and one must find the motivation to hurdle them.

My whole life up until i was eighteen revolved around school and church (just sundays)[catholic]. My dad was the principle of the local high school and i was Mr Mulhollands son. Having two brothers ahead of me i was also know as (his) little brother. I,  for a long time was looking for my voice and i knew from an early age that reading and school wasn’t the place for me to find it (i was wrong). I couldn’t wait to get off from school and go to Holiday Market to play video games, yes Pac Man. I did  just enough to get by in school.  I am pretty sure there were opportunities for the teachers to grade me a bit harder, maybe even easier,  but i think they kind of just let me get by, after all he (i) was the principles son. My point is that i never felt a push to do better. i never felt motivation to accumulate literacy which i would find to be a key to advancement, i chose to accumulate as little as possible.  As long as i passed then i was able to play sports and that seemed to be the place for me. What a surprise i had set up for myself in the future.

I can remember there would be a reading contest; those who read the most books would accumulate a gift. Enter onomatopoeia,,,wonka wonka wonka.  I was all about reading as less a possible, i didn’t care about a prize.. I think i may have had ADD. I couldn’t keep my mind on a paragraph let alone a sentence and by the time i got to the end of the page; nothing. I accumulated no knowledge. I would go back and read it again and in the end give up.  But some how i made it through. Well until i got to college and started to feel the pressure of having to achieve, having to pick a goal and going for it. Those little cherries that would make the enemies ghosts and let me through were no where in site.  I ended up putting so much pressure on myself that i dropped out a couple of times. Talk about “piling it on”, The moral to the story is that my idea of accumulating literacy has been an internal struggle to the point that if i was suicidal, i would have killed myself more than once. Luckily there was alcohol and drugs to help me through.  I don’t mean for this blog to be a personal journal about me, but when it comes to opportunities in life i have squandered and it is many, i know how important it is to have an education.

Now that i am back for a third time. Now that i am sober, the idea of failure is beyond me. I know what i want. I know who i am. I know i want to keep accumulating literacy, knowledge, growth as an individual and most importantly positioning myself to help others like me. The only demon is the one we create. I created a big huge monster (Gruendle) that almost broke me and what i have learned the most from my travels on this earth is that i can create my own fiction.

I asked my dad about his accumulation of literacy and he told me he would read twenty books a semester. That was in between all of the bible readings in his catholic school. They didn’t have t.v. and i think he usesd reading as an blanket. He was the second youngest and his father died at a young age. I asked him about his idea of literacy now and he held up his ipad and said, enough said. I then told him he could save a hundred bucks a year by downloading the ER app and he said no one is taking my paper away from me. I feel the same way. I went to Barnes and Noble a while back and the guy at the kiosk asked me if i wanted to test drive a nook. I told him i love to hold on to a book. So i understand my dad’s perspective about holding the news paper. I guess that will be one thing i miss or one thing i am sorry the next generation wont have and that is holding on to a good book. After All a book won’t run out of battery.

All this talk about what is literacy has open my eyes to the bigger picture. This picture is like a Dali painting. Just when you think you get it the clocks begin to melt and you cant tell what time it is. I know me being critical about the question What is literacy was a bit sarcastic but i just feel the language being used to persuade me into believing the authors theses is a bit esoteric. Beyond my in ability to retain all the information in these articles there are many sailiant points that i have derived. The first is that literacy is not a contour drawing where the viewer can easily surmise the form. Instead it is a convoluted web of agents and sponsors offering or inflicting their views on what literacy is or better yet what is it for and how should it be delineated.

whether we as a community see literacy as a means to an end or a means to become something greater the conversation of how literacy effects us on an individual level or a societal level will be never ending. We could argue all day long about how we should teach and what we should teach, but we can all agree that we need to teach.

There is a state of grace beyond the religious meaning of grace, there is power with literacy and there is a pragmatic necessity to the adaptation of such.  Grace to me is something i  endeavor yet hardly obtain, yet when it comes to acquiring knowledge and effectively offering it as part of me, it is a great gift to myself; virtue. When it comes to grace objectified by what others think of me i don’t really care; unless they find me graceful. Literacy is power; especially when you try and persuade someone to believe your argument. Without challenging oneself to obtain higher degrees of literacy,  the lower the chance of having intellectual conversation that can tend to your state of grace. Literacy as adaptation is pragmatic and a necessity to let’s say buying healthy food. So if there is a basic starting point to what literacy is or what is it for it should at least be for texting your Gr8 db8. So we as future teachers should use all mediums to inspire kids to read and write.

 

My name is Mike Mulholland and I have a reading problem. When i was in the first grade the student assistant teacher had us in small groups and asked me to read out loud. I was doing great navagating my way through the sounds of words coming out of my mouth and into my ears and my eyes moving along the lines of letters; until i came to the word canoe. I said out loud “ka know.” I kept on going til i heard the teacher say stop. What was that word again. I struggled, sounding it out and said again. “ka know.” All eyes were on me, especially the eyes of my other. The conscious self peeping from outside me. I was frightened, embarrassed and in trouble. The teacher told me never to keep reading if you don’t know how to pronounce the word. Well, being a Pisces, the youngest child and aware of myself as object to myself, i never forgot that day and thus realized from a very young age that i must have a reading problem.

There were other troubles in my youth when it came to reading and won’t share the family issue but it is sad i felt this way. Ever since then i didn’t think i was a good reader and still today i have problems with reading and retention. Especially when people like Swede use unnecessary vocabulary to get their point across;  …everyone agrees to be a necessity of modernity. Beyond this uncomfortable sentence i can still find worth to the topic. Even though i had to read it three times I find the topic of literacy important.  When swede states that we don’t fully know what literacy is…i stopped and sounded out the proclamation. I even went to my dictionary to see if it was “stunning” that we don’t know what literacy is. I was stunned to find that swede is wrong. I think we all know what it is. It is one’s ability to read and write. In  the next sentence swede does state a fundamental problem; what is reading and writing for? What is literacy and it’s place in today’s society? How do the effects of literacy or illiteracy effect how people move in and out of society? a purality of literacies.

I find reading swede’s essay to be like pulling teeth. Manufacturing an argument about literacy stating that even non-educated people speak of what is literacy? They must be a fun group to hang out with. Even so i metaphorically hit the button for happy gas and trudge forward. Swede speaks of the five elements of literacy; text, context, function, participants and motivation. I will write of the one that speaks to me and this would be motivation. I can’t do anything in life unless i am motivated to do it. Getting out of bed requires a tremendous amount of motivation. Without there being an end goal i would never get out of bed. If it weren’t for the idea of coffee i would still be there.  So when it comes to reading if there is nothing to be gained for my brain then it is hard to retain what the topic and purpose is. Perhaps there should be six elements and the last being purpose. The reading I have to do for my History of the English Language is pulling teeth. There are dates and linguist names i can’t remember or ever retain and i have to re-read the sentence because my mind wonders off to la la land. I get to the end of the page and wonder what the hell did i just read. The motivation is there, there is a purpose but the context is lost because the text is dry bread with no butter.