Blog 3: Are Pencils a Thing of the Past?

Every generation seems to pile up, while simultaneously spreading out our literacy practices. While we now have layers of knowledge that build off the things our parents and grandparents knew, we also expand outward through our literacy practices based on technologies that are new and evolving. There is no doubt in my mind (and I think Brandt would agree) that each generation has a higher expectation for literacy ability. The society, culture and educational system are what causes this growth of literacy expectations. My worry is that with an exponential growth as rapid as ours is, what will be required of my future children will be too much.

My great-grandmother is still alive, and attempted to write an autobiographical novel a couple years ago. She wrote down basics of her life, her childhood traumas and how she overcame them, but did not know how to organize them to make one cohesive story. She was never taught story writing and hasn’t read a lot of novels. In her life she was only taught literacy through the catholic church. She read her scriptures and prayers, but was never exposed to creative writing. Now that it interests her, she struggles with arthritis and cannot spend the time it takes to figure out this type of literacy that is foreign to her. She asked me if I would take her stories and try to make them one chronological story because she knows that today’s educational system has taught me the basic skills to do something like that. I was given instruction on how to write formal writing, casual writing, informative writing, essay writing, creative writing and more. I have worked on her story for the past couple years, but I always feel like I struggle to do justice to her stories because I wasn’t there.

This example shows how not only have I learned what she learned as a girl, but I have learned many more literacy practices and been exposed to many forms of literacy. I have both piled things on top of her literacy understanding and also expanded and spread outward from anything she learned at my age (although to me this literacy knowledge has little to do with actual intelligence). This is what brings me back to my first point, what will my children be required to know? I wonder if my great-grandchildren will have to be given my story, typed in black letters on the computer where they will create a  hologram of someone who reads the story to you, or they will make a movie using some form of computer technology to interpret my story. I will lack the literacy skills that they have piled up and have expanded. My literacy will seem simple, mundane, and archaic.

This doesn’t scare me, it is exciting and cool that things don’t stay the same. But what I can’t figure out is if Brandt’s ideas of accumulating literacy really means accumulating? Is there a point, or a threshold where our brains cannot store so many literacy skills and abilities? Will children only learn the new and cease to learn the ways of the old?  Can writing on paper with a pen become an extinct practice? And if so, do I even care? I guess what I am really getting at here is, when does the bottom layer of the “pile” disappear (or cease to be taught) and when does spreading out become more prominent than accumulation?