Why do I need this?

What I fear most about English and teaching it is the inevitable question of “why do I need to know this?” As horrible as it may seem, learning for the sake of learning is sometimes not so interesting, and I have asked myself the same question time and time again. Having purpose seems to help when trying to achieve a goal, but sometimes it is really hard to come up with a good answer. When it comes to reading, I have never needed much forced purpose other than my love for it and my geeky obsession with words. However, when it comes to writing that is a whole other story. I constantly have to remind myself that I need to learn to write a good essay so that one day I can teach my students to do the same, but why? Why do they need to know this? Why is it so important that their literacy be expanded? When will they ever use a 5 paragraph essay in the “real world”? How am I going to convince them they do need it if I don’t even believe that myself? But what I never consider, and Brandt had to remind me, is that the “real world” is constantly changing and instead of preparing students for something they will need to know in the job market “right now” we need to be preparing them for something they will use “someday.” This thought never really hit me until I read “Accumulating Literacy.”

When Brandt started talking about Genna May and her literacy practices I was almost envious. I got stuck on that last sentence of the first paragraph about how she only uses writing to balance her checkbook and send birthday cards. How nice would that be? To not have a constant flow of emails to respond to and blog posts to write and twitter and facebook posts. My future adult life flashed before  my eyes with mirage of papers to grade, emails to send, lesson plans to write. It would seem much simpler to live a life without all those messy words but today that isn’t possible. And I can’t honestly say I would like it better without them. Who cares if my mom is the only one who reads my status, it’s nice to post something into the world and have someone acknowledge my opinion. What would my life be like if I couldn’t reply to what I read in the news and comment on something someone said in a way that doesn’t make me look like an idiot?

It becomes hard to resist the urge to blame the education system and claim that teaching strong literacy only feeds into the system and doesn’t truly benefit you outside of it, and for some things that is true. But it’s easy to say you don’t really need to know how to read and write that well until you really do. You can tell yourself that you won’t ever need to know how to write a business letter or a resume until you are out of work and you really need to impress the manager at the place you are applying because 50 other people are applying as well. You never know when you might need to contact your children’s teachers or principal, or write a letter to your boss or the editor of a magazine, or perhaps you just want to reply to an interesting quote you saw online. Our era calls for constant use and expansion of our reading and writing abilities. It can become easy to use the cop-out of “I’m never going to use this”, but when you receive a letter back from your lawyer with the grammar mistakes and spelling errors circled you’ll wish you paid more attention in class and really practiced those skills the teacher “claimed” you would use later. Reading and writing is important for us and future generations because words are all we have and without them you lack access to everything this technological era has to offer and today, access is everything. Without it, equality can never become a reality.