Reflection

Matt Poundstone

May 14, 2013

Literacy Studies- Reflection

 

Gordon Stewart, Academic Dean and Professor of English and Writing at the University of Virginia, my travel writing professor, instructed me that every experience you choose to write about should be headlined by one word that defines the sensation you felt when you experienced it.

 

Kairos: the opportune time and/or place, the right or appropriate time to say or do the right or appropriate thing.

 

That same professor I wrote of in my preface to this reflection also once told me “Teaching is an art, Matthew—the ability to pass an inherent passion onto others is a great responsibility, and it’s a disservice to our society to not cultivate that passion of teaching and learning, both internally and externally.” Though I was flattered with such a man recognizing a gift like that in me, I couldn’t uphold the exigency of his statement.  I never wanted to be a teacher; education is not what I went to college to study; I am someone who could not handle the responsibility of that particular profession. My unique passion for learning could not fit the curtailing realm of a classroom. I walked into Kim Jaxon’s Literacy Studies class (which was replete with English Education majors) with that same demeanor that I described—confident (borderline pompous) that my writing and reading acumen would more than suffice in being successful in this class. I wanted to imprint such acumen upon this course, which I felt was designed for future educators, in the hope of maintaining upholding the demand of Professor Stewart through them. With every new blog and article I felt I was structuring the decorum of my writing to fit that of a present or aspiring educator. I maintained this rhetorical facade throughout the assigned readings and reflections until Deborah Brandt, and her article of “Sponsors of Literacy”, stripped it from me.

To quickly summarize Brandt’s article for prosaic purposes, its discourse presents the combination of literacies that make people unique in their education and their supplementation of it. To a person like myself–someone who believed idiosyncrasy is an invariable forerunner in learning–I felt an initial connection to this article; it was a vindication of my paradox within scholastics; I had passion in the curriculum but apathy in the structure. To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety…” It had to have been at this opportune time and place in my life to be asked this question by Brandt: “How are we to understand the vicissitudes of individual literacy development in relationship to the large-scale economic forces that set the routes and determine the worldly worth of that literacy?” Every feeling that I wore as a suit of armor: passion, arrogance, contradiction, was ebbed out and diluted to their forerunner: apprehension. I was– and am– apprehensive that my passion of literacy will be unfounded in the future; and to compensate, I made my literacy an island, diminishing all the other sponsors that have gone into the cultivation of it (family, friends, teachers, mentors, supervisors, editors, influential authors, etc.). From then on my writing was not only stripped of all conceit and decorum, but bore a subtle ode to the sponsors of my literacy.

 

John Donne wrote, “No one man [or woman] is an island… one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators.” My perspective has been shifted and molded with every new sponsor who chooses to invest in me. They translate the antecedent chapter of my literacy into another, and in this nascent paradigm I have been able to perceive my education as path; one that is paved by interaction and sponsorship. That, in itself, is “Kairos”, the epigraph of this reflection and the epitaph of my apprehension.