Reflecting on a semester and life

Up until now, literacy has always been very black and white.  If you were literate, you could read or write.  If you were illiterate, you could not.  Now, I understand that it is deeper than that.  It is a matter of what considered a literacy practice.  Because of course, something I had never thought about before, is the fact that everything written is literacy.  Functional literacy was something I had never considered before.  The idea that those people who do not necessarily read “well” by conventional standards are still able to function in a society.  A person who does not read novels still understands that a stop sign means “stop” or that bread can be found on the aisle with the number one over it.

Yes, the class was helpful in terms of considering literacy for future teaching practices.  But when I signed up for the class, I was an English Education Major.  Now, I am considering higher education as a goal, so I am only a lowly English Studies Major.  The difference is that I no longer see lesson plans in my future.  I see stubborn college kids and eager writers.  So while this class was interesting because it brought up ideas of different methods of teaching, it was also very helpful in getting me to understand why my elementary school had it all wrong.

Take sponsorship for example.  Even while discussing the concept in class, it took me a bit to understand that sponsors were not only the people who encouraged you to read, but possibly the people who were detrimental to my learning.  Well that opened a whole new can of worms.  I was never encouraged to read in school.  I wasn’t necessarily discouraged until in sixth grade, when they decided I had a relatively low reading score because of a star test I took fifth grade- notice that that was the first year I was in pseudo-foster care and being told that my mother was going to die just about any day now.  But up until then I wasn’t really discouraged, I was just never really encouraged.  My school tried a few halfhearted attempts at games and races to see who could read the most at home or get through the most books or what have you.  At home, on the other hand, my father was reading to us from Tolkien, Rowling, Carrol, and Lewis (although at the time I was convinced his name was See-Us-Loo-us).  I didn’t think of reading in terms of a fun pastime, but just something that we did, typically with my father.  When I think of later, when I started wanting to reread the stories my father had read to me when I was little, teachers began telling me that I couldn’t read them because they were just too advanced for me.  Its only now, after taking this class, that I realize why I did not become a big reader or studier in school.  What is a child supposed to think when they find out that the books they have already read are too advanced for them? Well this child thought that if books I had already read were too advanced, then the books I hadn’t yet read were pretty much Everest.  Unclimbable.

I want to spend some more time talking about my father and how he used to read to us when we were little.  I say that he read to us and maybe you envision us sitting on his lap in a big arm chair in a big living room surrounded by warmth and love.  Really, my father lived in a one bedroom duplex in the country that always smelled like mildew, firewood, and something distinctly that house.  There was no armchair, no big squishy beds, no heaps of stuffed animals.  We visited on the weekends and slept on camp beds and a big rollout futon.  When he sat us down for a bedtime story, we picked one off the shelf, he put on a headlamp and turned out the lights.  Then he read to us, stories from Aesops Fables, Travels of the Fox, James Herriot, or, as I mentioned earlier, something he wanted to read like JRR Tolkien or Ulysses.  The he read to us for half an hour or so, using a voice he reserved for reading to us.  He made up voices and accents for the characters and breathed life into these stories.  Once, when we were put into foster care, he recorded a few stories for us on cassette tapes so that he could read to us even when we weren’t with him.

I think my takeaway for this class is the idea that you can’t encourage a child too much.  Adolescence is a tough time, but imagine it without characters like Judy Bloom, Harry Potter, Anne Frank, and The Outsiders to relate to.  Imagine childhood without Owl in Love and Woman in the Wall to teach young girls about becoming a woman.  Imagine a life without Shakespeare.  I guess you can thank Wishbone for introducing me to Shakespeare and Cyrano before the age of eight.

I think the most important thing I’ll take away from this class is the idea that literacy isn’t just reading a writing.  Its weird saying that even now, even after I’ve been pounding this idea into my brain for the last three months, but that’s really what this class has taught me.  As a reader, thinking that there are people who genuinely don’t like reading astounds me.  But it’s true.  And those people aren’t illiterate.  It isn’t necessarily that they can’t read, just that they don’t like to.

Also, learning literacy isn’t easy.  We talk about reading like it is something innate, but we forget how hard it was to learn.  Really, it took us three years, from kindergarten to second grade.  We didn’t jump straight into reading the newspaper.  We had to look at the pictures in the funnies first, then we had to be able to read the funnies, and then we might have moved on to advertisements with big letters we could run tiny fingers under.  But yet people talk about learning to read as if it is something that can be taught overnight, something that can be summarized into a single document.  And after taking this class and realizing how many documents there are, I know that this idea is a fallacy.  How do you define literacy, which is a word as versatile as “love” or “hate?”  How do you define an idea that is by definition lose and undefined?  Answer: maybe you can’t, and maybe you shouldn’t, because maybe the definition for everyone is just a little bit different.