Two-year-old genius

I like how this essay begins with an intro about Michael May and how he was introduced to literacy at just the age of two. He took advantage of his resources such as the holiday cards, the magnetic chart, the typewriter, the computer and his parents and grandparents that could help teach him. Brandt even says that they weren’t a very privileged family. They didn’t have access to an advanced education, they had access to a twelve week program considered to be school. Even with these disadvantages Michael May became very successful in academics and this was simply because he used every resource.

Last semester I took English 278 based on writers from early American Literature. People like Christopher Columbus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Edgar Allen Poe. These are all writers from centuries ago and they are all considered to be brilliant scholars. We talked a lot about how they scavenged to become this way and it was mainly because they taught themselves. We’ve been talking about in class how public versus private schools create an advantage or disadvantage, which to an extent can be true, but in reality anyone is capable of learning if they dedicate their time to it.

Brandt also discusses how literacy is developing in two directions, vertically and horizontally. Meaning that in formal schooling the levels of literacy are becoming more difficult and also that from our past, their literacy practice and materials are being introduced to our modern day literacy. Horizontally, literacy is expanding in several different elements such as reorganizing an array of economic, legal, political and domestic activities (5). This goes back to our idea of public versus private literacy. One of Brandt’s lines that really stood out to be is when she says, “Transformation models reveal how older and newer incarnations of literacy may be operating simultaneously at any historical moment, usually-but not always- in a complementary relationship” (7). I perceived this line as meaning that literacy is always transforming. We have been discussing how literacy is so hard to define that we have almost agreed that it cannot be defined, but after reading this argue I think that literacy’s best description and/or definition is that it is transforming. There is no way of knowing or teaching a specific way of how to be “literate” for it is always changing, but if a two-year-old can become a genius, so can anyone!