Gibbons- My Daddy Says…

I chose to do my interview with my father because he grew up in a rural portion of Illinois with 7 siblings. I believe his input and experience with different literacy practices could expand our data of ages 50+

1. Try to think of your earliest memories of writing and reading.  What do you remember of reading and writing before you began school?  Who helped you with it and what was that like?

Don’t remember reading and writing before school….I’m old.

2. What kinds of writing did you see your parents, siblings, and other family members doing as you were growing up?  What did they read, where, and when?

Father was a draftsman and wrote technical narratives with the work. No real memory of family members reading.

3. 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?

My father was an initially self educated man. He put value into  self education personal drive and entrepeurnialsm No real memories of parents putting emphasis on reading and writing. Teachers were the biggest driving force, especially while in Catholic School.

4. How did reading and writing change as you entered elementary school?  What did you do with it?

About 7th grade reading became a favorite pastime and I willingly read many books on my own. Westerns, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner were some of my favorites.

5. What are you asked to do with reading and writing at this point in your lives?

Job related, technical studies.

Writing

6. 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?

No computers were used at that time.

7. In the next ten years, what will reading and writing become?  What skills and understandings about online literacy will people need to have?  Why?

Writing has not changed for 1000 years, only the method of placing it on paper has changed.

Copy and Pasting is golden! Online research is so readily available in a much shorter time than the old style of research. If you can’t write in the first place the computer don’t mean nothin!