What is your literacy history?
My Literacy History — A Homework Assignment
What is your literacy history? Do you ever think about it or how it shapes you?
1. Artifacts
- The beginning: The Christmas card that was never sent.
When I was in kindergarten I wrote a Christmas card to my grandparents letting them know my parents were fighting and I asked them if we could live there. It had a picture in crayon on the cover of a colorful tree. The words were spelled incorrectly. My mother saved it too embarrassed to send it to her parents. I found it when I was in second grade among my mother’s saved cards. She was sentimental that way. She would save letters and things people sent her.
- My middle childhood: The language of numbers is international
In elementary school I always wanted to play school. I would take my drawing paper and create worksheets for my mom who was my student. She cried because under the lines I’d write representing blank spaces for ‘the student’ to fill in it said “subject” and “predicate” in parentheses. She didn’t know what those were. Rather than tell me or teach me her language, she felt shame. I was always making worksheets for myself and my stuffed animal classroom. I would often complete them myself. I was pretty excited when I had a real human student. We switched to math worksheets after that. We didn’t have any children’s books in the house although my father had a floor to ceiling library. The closest thing to a children’s book was White Fang (London, 1906).
- My middle school years: Standardized English Tests
I think I was in 6th grade when I was faced with my first difficult test. The whole school had to take this test. I had no idea what was going on. I knew none of the rules of writing even though I read fairly well and was a straight A student. I never thought there were rules. I struggled and I earned a very low score. The school didn’t place me in any intervention classes. But I intervened on my own behalf as was what I was accustomed to doing.
- Two high schools: By senior year I was in AP English and Humanities
I remember reading Antigone (Antigone, 441 BC), Metamorphosis (Ovid, 8 AD), The Metamorphosis (Kafka, 1915), The Scarlett Letter (Hawthorne, 1850), The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925), Nine Stories (Salinger, 1953), A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway, 1929), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera, 1984), Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949), The Stranger (Camus, 1942), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith, 1943), and so many more. I remember everyone making such a big deal about Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951), but I didn’t really care for it.
- Young adulthood: I can choose my own books, but am persuaded by peers
Details below.
- College: All textbooks all the time
I am blanking on any authors of any of the textbooks, but the classes that stand out include Anatomy and Physiology (these were huge books), Biomedical ethics (a philosophy class), Wilderness Psychology, all kinds of accounting books, Dramatic Writing and Poetry (much Shakespeare was studied here), Calculus, Statistics, and many anthropology books. One anthropology book I do recall is Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (Good et al, 1991). But we read Margret Mead and Jane Goodall and others also.
- Parenthood: Harry Potter and picture books
My daughter started reading to me the first day of summer after kindergarten. She picked up my copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling, 1999) and started reading. Until then, I had read to her and she loved to get books read to her. Her favorite had a purple cover with a mouse in a dress. We read it so many times she memorized it and would catch me if I skipped a page. I’ve blocked it from my mind for the most part now.
2. My artifacts illuminate my literacy history with a steep curve triggered by a standardized test in middle school. This trigger caused me to eventually fall into a social group that sought intellectual stimulation as well as an understanding of the self. They rebelled against societal norms and were escape artists. They were generally distrusting of square adults. My literacy history suggests that this ‘membership’ and self identity is based in acquiring a deep understanding of what it is to be human as well as an artist.
The artifact — or experience — I’m refering to is Young adulthood: I can choose my own books, but am persuaded by peers. Connecting books and movies based on books also happened at this time. This was quite a time of pseudo-intellectual café culture mixed with clubbing and the superior feeling that you could have ‘intellectual conversations’ over cigarettes in the alley of a club.
From afar, it was a time of searching and it was a destructive time as well as a regenerative time. It was a time to learn about the Hindu Goddess Kali who is a destroyer, but also a creator — She also transcends good and evil. It was a time to travel, make mistakes, find successes and failures, struggle to define the self and selflessness, and reflect. It meant trying on a variety of masks to see what fits.
What I understand about it now is that all things happen in good time and that we wouldn’t be who we are without our experiences.
My artifact was not a text. It was an experience of identity that included several texts. My family culture (as it was both Eastern and Eastern European), school, peers, and self were all lenses in which to view through.
3. My list of literacy artifacts and stories help me think about literacy instruction and research in that I can reflect on my teachers and professors more deeply as well as the guidelines they followed to create our reading lists and discussions. Research comes naturally when you have curiosity.
I am most drawn to certain aesthetics when it comes to topics and ideas related to literacy. I look for beauty and elegance, even if gritty. I am drawn to topics and ideas that bring forward truth (of some kind) and demonstrate aspects of humanness.
