Who am I? What has made me? What experiences have I had in my life that make me who I am today? What are my values I have learned through life? What are my biases? What do I like? What do I know? What am I good at? Am I literate? Why is it that I can read road signs, play tennis, read novels, go camping? Why is it that I’m not very good at math, directions, or golf? These are questions that I have continually thought about and will always ponder. Who I am has been influenced by my family, friends, teachers, coworkers, and life’s experiences.
My own literacy began early in my childhood. Like almost all kids, I started to form my habits at a young age from my parents and people around me. When I was still in a car seat and not able to talk, my mom would just drive around and talk with me as if I could completely understand her and given the chance, would talk back. That was only the beginning of my literate future. In addition to just talking with me, my mom read me numerous stories. Each night before I went to bed, we would sit and read at least two books. I could probably tell you exactly what happens with the Giving Tree, Where the Wild Things Are, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, because I had my mom read them to me so many times. Mom always had a plethora of books to choose from. She’s a huge part of why I love, and still love children’s books. That was probably when my first love for reading began to form. My dad, although not home as much as my mom to read with me, still started me young with the reading literacy. There’s a picture of me, barely four months old, propped on the kitchen table with a newspaper right beside me, and dad holding the bottle in my mouth while reading the newspaper! I had to learn then that reading the must be pretty important if that was more exciting than paying attention to your hungry daughter. My family has always placed a strong emphasis on reading.
As Finn continually points out, “There’s literacy, and then there’s literacy” (124). There are so many more literacies in addition to reading literacy. I was privileged to experience many other forms of literacy. My mom was determined to make sure I tried everything so I could figure out what I was good at and what I enjoyed. I attempted everything from gymnastics and pottery to horseback riding and piano lessons. Mom wanted her daughter to be a well-rounded individual that was not overly focused on one thing. This taught me that some people are really good at some things, and others just are not; but, that’s ok. Thus, this demonstrates that there are various levels of literacies in different areas for all people. I am going to incorporate this into my classes by not only focusing on the English literature, but also really trying to draw on my students’ experiences from other areas.
While I was young, I was very fortunate because I came from a White, middle class family, where mom stayed at home with the kids, and it was just expected that I would read, do well in school, and continue my education. Throughout my childhood, I had many advantages, such as, always being expected to go to college and continual parental support and encouragement. Due to the fact that it was expected that I do well in school, my parents were always extremely supportive of me and willing to help me with my school work. Remember all of those projects we all have had in grade school? Well, my parents were an enormous addition to my good grades on those. Although I always helped with the projects, often, my parents would help come up with the ideas and help me follow through with them. I had to make a diagram of Crater Lake once, and I still remember my mom and I at our kitchen table paper macheing, while dad was downstairs making the foundation for the Crater Lake we were making. Not all students will receive that amount of love and support. I don’t know where I would be if my parents were not there to guide me through school. I have learned that I need to be conscious of the various amounts of parental support with my students. If there is a student like me, whose parents help them a lot and the project looks wonderful, and a student who did the entire project all on their own, yet not quite as visually appealing as the first one, the second child deserves the same grade, if not better. I know that I would not be where I am today if I hadn’t had parents that were willing to sit and talk to me and encourage me to be as educated as possible.
Although my parents had a large impact on my literacy levels, my extended family has also influenced me. First, my family has given me a wide scope of religious literacy. On only my dad’s side of the family, there are Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Atheists. That’s a large scope for one family and we all get along amazingly well. I have been able to learn a little about all of these religions and understand where they are coming from. Another aspect of my family that has influenced my interest in both teaching and empathy for ESL students, is my grandma. She spent three hours every Saturday and worked with ESL students to improve their English literacy. Gram would tell me about her students and how much they were improving and how much she enjoyed working with her students. It’s through family like my grandma, that I am excited to teach multiple literacies to people.
While I had a strong foundation for a high academic level of literacy, that is not always the case. I have had multiple experiences of a lower academic levels of literacy that has influenced my decision to be an educator. A memory that I will always have with me is my high school Spanish class. While I am literate in English, in Spanish, I am nowhere close. Each day I would struggle to do even simple tasks such as read and understand just one word, let alone an entire sentence. I remember feeling extremely inadequate and never wanting the teacher to call on me because I knew that I would sound like a fool. For me, this was a glimpse into what it might be like for a person with a different first language. I was talking with my cooperating teacher and she shared with me a story of a girl that she had in one of her classes. The girl had recently arrived to America from Korea so her English was almost non-existent. One of her teachers began to give directions, and when the girl didn’t follow them because she couldn’t understand English, the teacher proceeded to yell and embarrass her in class. It was only when another Korean translated, that she was able to follow directions. This demonstrates both how imperative it is to have a functioning literacy in the country you are living in, and how teachers must be patient with their students. Had I been this girl, it would have been a while before I felt comfortable enough in class to talk. That is inexcusable.
Another experience I encountered, was when I was tutoring. Both
girls, while intelligent, were not able to grasp the concepts they were
reading. They were not illiterate in the sense that they couldn’t
read, they were just not able to process the information correctly.
The girls were not accustomed to thinking in terms of numbers and business;
their literacies were stronger in English. Fortunately, through teaching,
we were able to work through that and they were able to understand the
concepts. Both of these events inspired me to want to give people
the extra bit of encouragement and knowledge to take their literacy to
the next level.
Besides academic literacy, I also chose to enhance my musical and athletic
abilities. Throughout Jr. High and High School, I was part of the
choir and the band. This takes a lot of knowledge regarding how to
postulate my mouth to produce the best sound, how to read notes, and how
to read the movement of the music. While some students increased
their literacy running the fifty-yard dash, I chose to improve my literacy
of music. In addition to music, I also played tennis and badminton
in high school. Now, someone might assume that there isn’t much to
a game of badminton other than hitting the birdie around. However,
it takes a lot of strategical literacy to know which person to hit it to,
where on the court, how hard or soft to hit it, and whether it should be
an overhand or underhand swing. These are all things that a student
increasing their football literacy would not understand. I appreciated
it when my teachers understood and supported me in my activities outside
of school, therefore, I hope that I can also learn more about my students
and see what they do outside of school. Students extra activities
really define who people are.
Teaching literacy skills and developing them is one of the most challenging parts of educating. The first and most basic step is to ensure that my students have the ability to read. Because I grew up in an environment where not knowing how to read was never an option, it is very hard for me to grasp the concept that the students I will be teaching at a high school level might not be able to read or may choose not to read. I hope to never let a student leave my class without being at the proper reading level. This will be a challenge, but I hope that with extra time, encouragement and affection for my students, they will become more motivated to become more literate. With the ability to read, they will have reached a higher academic literacy, which will help them in the future. However, even beyond that, is the concept that my students are going to have literate interests that are not going to take part in my classroom. To find the balance of academic literacy and general literacy is going to be a challenge, but that is how my students are really going to retain the knowledge they learn in class. If I want my students to remember parts of what I was trying to express after they graduate, it must be relevant to them. They will remember what they can relate to. Whether that means writing a paper on how to win a football game or what characteristics make the best friends, hopefully I can find multiple ways to entertain my students incorporating their other literacy levels.
The second step, which to me is the most important, is teaching people how to think. A teacher of mine always said, “The art of teaching is putting students into a situation in which they can not escape without thinking”. This is a motto that I hope to continue when I am a teacher. We can all go though life reiterating what people have told us, but to be able to think and reason on our own is a gift. Students need their own identities, goals, confidence, and ideas. When they have this, they will be able to really be their own person and express their emotions, ideas, knowledge, and really make a mark in the world. As an English teacher, we have the privilege to really make a difference in the literacy level of our students.
One of the goals I hope to accomplish when I am teaching is to stop the ignorance that people have towards situations they are unfamiliar with. Growing up in a diverse area, but a school in which races stayed to themselves, my high school rarely gave me the chance to interact with other races. During the lunch hours, for the most part, students sat together based upon their races. I never felt comfortable with my race literacy to cross the invisible lines between the White and Black students. Looking back, I wish that the issue of race had been addressed and talked about so that I had more friends that were of different races. The same phenomena happened in my classes. My honors classes were predominately White students. This bothered me in high school because it didn’t make sense to me why with such a technically diverse population, why I didn’t have more diversity within my classes. This is a large reason why I am so interested in ensuring that my classes address the issues of race and talk about it in class so my students no longer feel frightened about the issues of race and crossing the invisible race line as I did. Beverly Tatum, author of Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, comments on how to unlearn the racism that exists in our society. Simply, “Deepening awareness usually leads to a commitment to unlearn one’s racism” (106). Forcing students to acknowledge that racism does exist, and it’s alright to admit that racism does exist. The challenge is in finding ways to stop the racism that exists. Tatum continues further in her book, “We need to continually break the silence about racism whenever we can. We need to talk about it at home at school, in our houses of worship, in our workplaces, in our community groups” (193). Talking and learning about other people and their feelings and thoughts will make a world of difference. Although multicultural books are important to expose students to other cultures, the learning does not just stop there. With the incorporation of Black, Asian, Native American, women, and homosexuals into our literature, students will begin to see some of the racism, sexism, and other prejudices that exist from a different perspective. This will force them to start to think about real life situations that they will need to address. I feel that if my teachers had expanded my race literacy through multicultural books and talking openly, I would be a stronger, more comfortable person today. The more I can get my students to think outside “the box” the more diverse and better educated they will be.
This semester I really began to discover how multifaceted literacy really is. One of the influences of literacy comes from the wide variety of racial, economic, ethnic and intellectual heritage. I have been able to start to observe how various literacy’s such as social and academic affect the classroom. The racial aspect is crucial to the dynamics of the classroom. My cooperating teacher has devised a way to incorporate multicultural learning into her system. Each month they have a booklet that has stories, poems, questions, and pictures that relate to the culture they are learning about. This enables most of the students to have a section in class that they can identify with culturally. It also allows the students to learn about cultures and races they might not have known about before. A perfect example of this is demonstrated through Martin Luther King, Jr. elementary school. These students are given the opportunity to really gain cultural knowledge from working with other students from over fifty different countries and cultures. This is a rare gift that King elementary school has capitalized on. There are students teaching students other languages. Some students act as translators. In this situation, students are able to learn from each other. Thus, situations such as the King school have shown me that not only can the students learn from each other, they are also learning how to teach each other. I believe that this at least doubles the amount of literacy that occurs in the classroom. Through gaining the literate knowledge of multiculturalism, the students become not only better students, but better individuals.
Another significant difference among the students is their intellectual heritage. This can influence the students in multiple ways. One of the ways it might affect them is in the support they receive at home. When I was a freshman entering high school, I was placed in the regular English class where we did a lot of basic reading and weekly spelling words. After about four weeks of this class, my mom decided that it was most likely not challenging enough for me a changed me into an advanced section of English. It was my parent’s guidance that persuaded me to challenge myself. Had they not intervened, I probably never would have started a harder English class, and maybe never wanting to be an English teacher. It is situations such as these that if the parents are not willing to support and encourage their kids to do well in school, there is less of a chance of them pushing themselves to their capabilities. Or maybe part of their cultural heritage results from their home country. For example, if their high school normally ends at the ninth grade, then there is a chance that the student might not see the necessity to continue school until twelfth grade. When I was taking a class trip up to Chicago, the gentleman that spoke to us said that this was a very real issue. The kids were just not as encouraged to pursue school as much as a job. This also made me start to want to teach in a fashion that would encourage them to want to learn. These are issues that as teachers, we must face and find solutions to. I believe that one of the easiest and effective solutions is to just be there to support and encourage the students to do well. Perhaps take that extra ten minutes each day to figure out what that student has for homework that day. If that does not work, maybe a solution such as having the student stay after school or come early and meet the teacher to do homework.
Another problem that we encounter in teaching, is the bias we all take into learning. One example of this can be seen in the Toni Morrison class I am taking. Morrison recalls a time when a woman approached her and asked “Do you write for white readers?”. When I first read this, it really surprised me. To assume that because the novel was not written about the race to which you belong to, it wasn’t meant for you to read, is something that I don’t want my students to encounter. I am hoping that I can avoid some of this stereotype by avoiding teaching only dead White male authors so my students will have the chance to think about other races, religions, sexualities, and genders. As Finn demonstrates, this kind of powerful literacy, literacy that can make a difference in the world and overcome injustices is imperative. “Nothing happens automatically when a person learns to read and write at a performative or functional level, certainly not powerful literacy” (127). Literacy involves all different perspectives and opinions. The society in which we live might also influence people to believe that people in a minority are not as well educated. Tatum comments on this saying, “Blacks have historically been characterized as less intelligent than Whites, and women have been viewed as less emotionally stable than men. The dominant group assigns roles to the subordinates that reflect the latter’s devalued status, reserving the most highly valued roles in the society for themselves” (23). These are social problems that are going to need to be addressed and worked with to fight against.
I am extremely worried about how my biases are going to influence my teaching. One of my biases stems from growing up in a middle class atmosphere. I don’t feel extremely comfortable in below poverty areas. If I make the decision to teach in an underprivileged area, I hope I never fall into Patrick Finn’s category of teaching to the working class where knowledge is “presented as fragmented facts isolated from wider bodies of meaning and from the lives and experiences of the students” (10). The students would be much more confident in themselves and achieve more in the world if the are taught in a fashion where “The point of school work was to achieve, excel, to prepare for life at the top” (20). Just because the students come from a lower socioeconomic background does not mean that they do not have the knowledge to be really challenged while they are learning. I am also not entirely confident in teaching multicultural material. While I feel it is a mandatory part of education, I am not always sure how to say the right things and get my point across without offending people. I am often worried that what I say is not being understood as I want it to. Another avenue that I am struggling with is my comfort level with homosexuality. It is something I have not had a lot of contact with, so once again, I am not sure the best way to present homosexuality. Social biases are something that we will not be able to escape while teaching. How we fight against them is the challenge. My goal is to recognize the biases and attempt to stop them. This can be done through things like talking about social bias and forcing the students to be aware that this is a real issue.
I am who I am because of my incredible relationships with people and all of the experiences that I have had. I have been blest in so many aspects of my life with everything from my loved ones to my education at the University of Illinois. I have come to realize that it is the people and things I have done that have influenced the literacy that affects me daily. As a future educator, I have the gift to be able to show and improve my students’ multifaceted forms of literacy.
Bibliography
Finn, Patrick. Literacy with an Attitude. Albany, New York.
State University of New York Press, 1999.
Tatum, Beverly. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together
in the Cafeteria?”. Basic Books, 1997.
HOMEork.
State University of New York Press, 1999.
Tatum, Beverly. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together
in the Cafeteria?”. Basic Books, 1997.