We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together.
Introduction to me!
Hey everyone, my name is Anna DeBoer; I’m a 20-year-old transferring junior from Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. My major is English Education (I know that’s really hard to believe in this class). I never knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. When college rolled around, I decided to do English because I was half-way decent at writing and I like to read. Now, I’ve gained a little more passion for it and have a desire to teach overseas or ESL classes here. I really want to teach non-native English speakers how to speak everyday, conversational English…i wanna teach em how we really talk. Not just all the good and proper stuff that they might need if they were gonna become a highly successful businessman in america. i wanna teach em slang. i wanna teach em our phrases and our stupid acronyms and our swear words. i wanna teach them our english:)
because anyone can learn a language out of a book and think they’re smart and then go over to a different country and say all the proper words but still sound like an idiot. and i know half the time most of the american youth sound like idiots these days too because of our phrases and slang and whatnot, but if i teach the non-native english speakers how to speak that way, at least they’ll be the “right kind” of idiots. anyways…
A little more about me:
I love to play soccer and I love Christ. I was recently blessed enough to travel to Japan on a Christian mission trip. As a sports ministry, we used the medium of soccer to connect with the Japanese people and tell many of them about the Gospel of Christ for the first time.
I come from a big family. I’m the youngest of seven kids all from the same two parents. I have four brothers and two sisters, and we have a lot of fun. We also have a lot of drama. Being the youngest sucks. You’re not spoiled; you’re patronized.
You’re probably bored right now so I won’t tell you anymore about me. I’ll tell you my undeniably intriguing opinion about Szwed’s article. (Hah, right.) I thought it was a little pretentious and ridiculous. I also thought it had some good points. To explain the pretentious and ridiculous comment: the author of the article seemed to demand that studies be done to calculate the exact meaning of literacy in different populations and minutely examine their implications and whatnot. Maybe this comes from being a really laid back person, but studies like that drive me crazy. What’s the point? We already know there’s a huge disparity between communities’ literacy levels and exactly what that means. He’s pointed out that literacy is not a black and white subject that can be easily defined. It changes form culture to culture, generation to generation. So why do we need to try to define it so exactly? Let’s appreciate it for what it is, broaden our perspectives of literacy from his well-written depiction of the vastness of the subject, and let it be. No intense studies or years-long examinations need be created. I find there’s no point in having the results.
That being said, I love what he had to say about literacy. We often don’t think, for example, that a boy who fails his standard English exams, but who marvelously disentangles that weird bunch of numbers in a baseball catalog, is literate. But he is. He is literate in reading baseball results. I can write a five paragraph, well-researched, well-organized, and well-cited essay on Shakespeare and still not be literate in baseball records. Or the stock-exchange. Or cookbooks (I always mess something up -__- ). Literacy is different to each people and that was definitely eye-opening to me. Why do lawyers exist? They are proficient in their area of literacy, whereas I am much less than capable.
I often have a prejudice against people who cannot write well. then i realize that i go on fb everyday and write like this and i have absolutely no problem with it. in fact, i love it. because it’s not stressful. it gets the point across perfectly – everyone understands what i’m saying, and yet it has absolutely no resonance with standard, proper english. then i realize the absolute beauty of language. shakespeare added over 1500 words and phrases to the english language. he just made them up. now they’re common.
language evolves.
how we communicate evolves and who am i to condemn it when i enjoy doing it? that’s part of the reason i want to teach english. real english. there is definitely a place for proper, grammatically correct, “literate,” english. but there is also a place for this type too. think about the mom or dad who speak and write correctly but who aren’t literate in internet talk? they have no idea what we’re saying because they aren’t literate in how we communicate. it’s endlessly ironic.
Language is constantly changing, and I intend to change with it. I’m half-way decent at writing and I like to read. Mostly, though, I like people and how we communicate with each other. I like our vast differences and our amusing idiosyncrasies. I like how we’re so unique but share something so fundamentally common, like literacy. I like our words and our languages. I just don’t like our studies…
Website:
One Reply to “Introduction to me!”
After reading your post, I found that you had a lot of interesting opinions that I both agreed and disagreed with. For starters, I understand why it is that you found those studies unnecessary and a waste of time, but I also see the practicality of them and why we need extensive studies such as those. It all plays into what you discuss later on in your post about the way people write in different atmospheres and the broadening of literacy awareness.
I’m not sure if it was intentional but it was really interesting to me how you crossed back and forth between writing “professionally” or properly and how you wrote “un-properly”. What I found interesting about this was the questions that it arose in my head about how we move between the different types of social literacies. When reading, some questions I asked myself were:
-How does this broaden our understanding of literacy and what we expect from others?
-Is it merely a form of communication or how we present ourselves in certain situations?
-What kind of literacy awareness do we have about ourselves and about others?
One of the reasons why I think we need to have extensive studies like the ones you dislike is because it helps us understanding not only WHAT kind of writing that people are doing (which is what you say we already know), but instead HOW they are doing that writing and WHAT it means to them. You also brought up my second point about understanding what we expect from others in terms of literacy and how we view others socially when analyzing the way they read and write.
Lastly, I would like to address the issues between digital literacy and the literacy of “our parents”. I thought you made a great point about how language evolves but it only rose more questions in me about whether or not we evolve with language or whether language evolves with us? As we move into an age where literacy changes with the influence of Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and etc, we have to try and understand how we move forward socially with literacy.