Reflection Post

When this class began, I was firmly set in my ways.  I knew the importance of “high literature.”  I knew that by reading it, people were improving their lives.  I knew that this wasn’t being taught properly in schools, and wasn’t being utilized by those who had received a good education.  Finally, I knew that this type of literacy (really the only kind of literacy) was being degraded by the likes of video games, text messaging, comic books (and their associated movies, which I still think are total crap) and social media.  I was an avowed believer in the coming literacy apocalypse.

Oh how things have changed.  Maybe I’ve been caught up in the hype.  Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by subversive, liberal academes.  Call it what you will.  Now I think that the literacy crisis has always been there, always will be, and never amounts to anything but hot air and bad educational decisions.  Now I think  that social media and text messaging aren’t eroding the pillars of literacy, they’re just new kinds of literacy.  Now I think that literacy is hard to gauge, and that it’s hard to jam everyone into one mold because people have different access to it in the first place.  Now I think that maybe video games aren’t always bad for kids, they might even be kinda good.  I still love and am devoted to literature, but if playing a first person shooter is going to turn kids on to John Dos Passos or if watching “The Thin Red Line” on netflix is going to compel people to pick of James Jones, well…