And so it begins…

Hello everyone! My name is Abby, and I am an English Ed major with just one semester left before graduation! I’m 25 years old, and somewhat recently returned to school (3 semesters ago) after a four-year hiatus from school. I completed my general ed at Sierra College right after high school, but I had approximately zero life direction or career ambition at the time. So after attaining my AA in Liberal Arts, I ditched school to backpack in New Zealand for 3 months, spent some time living at a camp and working as an outdoor activities instructor, and met this really awesome guy named Ben, who ended up asking me to marry him ;) We moved to Chico in 2011 so he could finish his degree in Mechanical Engineering, with the intent to move home to Grass Valley as soon as he graduated…but somewhere along the line, I discovered my passion for teaching and decided to go back to school, too! So that’s basically the story. When I’m not at school, you’ll find me working at TBar (basically my second home), running in Bidwell Park, escaping to the mountains for the weekend, or cooking something delicious and totally terrible for me.

I’m excited for this class because I’m really passionate about out-of-the-box teaching methods, and I’m looking forward to gathering more knowledge which will help me reach out to the less-than-stoked students in my future classes and help them to succeed. While there were several really interesting, new-to-me ideas in the Szwed article, one of my favorite moments was found on page 423: “The definitions of reading and writing, then, must include social context and function as well as the reader and the text of what is being written.” I love that Swed is concerned with social context and functional use with regard to the teaching of reading and writing. My math-brained engineer husband tells me that English classes always felt pointless to him, mostly because they read and wrote things that he was not interested in and which did not seem to carry any actual, practical life application. One of my passions as a future teacher is to construct a class that teaches reading and writing outside the context of classic literature, in an attempt to teach skills that will be interesting and actually apply to the lives of my non-English-loving students.

Also, I was pleasantly challenged by Szwed’s explanation of literacy as “not a single level of literacy, on a single continuum from reader to non-reader, but a variety of configurations of literacy”. I guess I have always kind of imagined literacy as a continuum, but I really like the notion that there are different “configurations” of literacy which are all equally valid. I hope that, as a teacher, I will be able to recognize the different configurations of literacy present in my students, and draw upon them to create a curriculum that will intersect with their interests and talents.