Doyle, Blog 1

My name is Jake Doyle and I am a super senior hailing from San Diego originally. I fought fires all this past summer and I am currently trying to get back into the habit of sitting still for any period of time, whether it is at school or home.
Besides writing down weather changes and fire behavior, I have not been an active writer or reader recently. After the beginning of school this past week I have gotten back into the flow of these two skills. When it comes to reading, I usually will look to fantasy novels or song lyrics from my favorite band’s releases. To me, reading helps to expand my vocabulary and improve my skills in writing. Different author’s preferred sentence structure and methods of writing give me an example to emulate with my own words later on. Reading helps me to escape into an alternate reality while stimulating my mind to paint a picture of the scenes in the pages. Some would say TV is much more visually appealing, yet reading makes my mind create an interpretation of the scene in my head, while TV will show a scene differently and in a way that I did not picture.

I thought the Szwed reading was interesting in the sense that he contradicts the popular idea that literacy is directly proportional to a countries success. Not only that, but Szwed smashes the idea of a standardized literacy. A standardized literacy only seeks to cater to those that are adept at reading and writing in a school setting. Literacy is argued to be far more complex than this basic understanding and therefore holds a broad range of material outside of the traditional institutional learning.