Literacy Interview Assignment

I interviewed my uncle so here’s a piece from the interview.

 

1. What stories did your parents tell you about their own efforts to learn to read and write?  What kinds of values did they place on reading and writing?

“They told me a lot of stories about them having to learn to read and write. They were born in the early 1920’s in New Mexico. My grandparents only spoke Spanish so my parents learned that as their first languages. They both said that when they started school, it was difficult on both of them because the curriculum was a lot different back then, and there weren’t specialized teachers at their schools to teach them to learn English. I would say that they placed greater value on reading and writing only because they both had a hard time in school. They made our first language English so that we could excel in school, but our parents still spoke Spanish to us just to make sure we didn’t lose that part of our culture.”

2. When you were growing up, how much school reading and school writing was done with computers?  What     kinds   of things did you do?  What values did your teachers place on computer literacy?

“I never even used a computer in school because this was the late 60’s to 70’s. You really should just write N/A in this whole section because I can’t tell you anything because I didn’t really use a computer until the late 80’s. Well, I can tell you my first encounter of a computer though. It was in middle school, and I remember walking into this room and seeing this massive machine that almost took up an entire room. All I really remember about it was that it had these punch-cards that you would see in old movies when people had to clock into work. It had a bunch of dots on them and I know it was used for some kind of programming, but it was so foreign to me that I can’t even tell you what it did because I didn’t understand it.”