Although nearing the completion of a class should feel like progress, I feel this semester that I’ve been spending a lot of time going backwards.

For our first substantial assignment, the literacy narrative, I wrote about why I chose to study English by talking about an influential teacher I had in high school. For the Digital Remix assignment, I’m re-presenting this essay by showing footage of an interview with this influential teacher. It seems that I keep finding ways to return to the place where I started.

It doesn’t seem like this is a good thing–most people have good experiences and move on from them in order to have new (and hopefully better) ones. I’m revisiting old experiences with the ambition of having something new result from them.

This habit of mine reminds me of how often I reread books. If I enjoy something, I will likely read it two or more times after the initial reading. It’s not usually an immediate re-visitation, but something that happens months or years later. It can be good to look over a book again, with more knowledge and ideas to apply to it, but looking back over something takes time away from encountering new things.

Does remembering this teacher’s sponsorship enable me to be a better sponsor? Perhaps, if I can use the same techniques she used, but doesn’t emulating her limit the range I can have as an individual?

How do you feel about revisiting the past in an effort to move forward? A lot of us have shared stories of our literacy practices in this course, ranging from when we were 3 and 4 up until the classes we’re taking at present. While these can be helpful to exemplify ideas, does dredging up memories hamper us from forming new connections or from applying the concepts we’re learning toward future experiences?

When I first learned about sentences, instead of making them linear, I wrote them in a list-like form:

The

cat

went

down

the

path.

The adults around me were concerned with the practice, one because it seemed I didn’t understand that the words of a sentence needed to be in a certain order, very close to each other, and two, I was going through a lot of paper.

Eventually I grew out of the habit, and I don’t know why it ever started. No one showed me how to write that way and my parents weren’t overly fond of listing. I think it was the different visual statement being made—mine was different from the rest of the class. I write letters much differently than most people—everything is sharp. I angle all the curves in letters, so my printing resembles a Greek (or heavy metal) inspired font. I went through the effort of changing my own handwriting purely for aesthetic reasons.

My relationship to literacy—how I chose to use the skill and adapt what I’ve learned—depends primarily on my preference. This isn’t good considering how many rules govern writing. Everyone looking at the first instance of “The cat went down the path” falling down the post know that this isn’t correct, despite it saying the exact same thing as the second occurrence.

I’m curious to know the ways you all break the rules in literacy. Do you read the last page of a book first so you’re not surprised? Do you write in purple as opposed to blue or black ink? Why do those of us who study English do so when there’s so much about it that doesn’t allow us to be ourselves?

As students in a composition class, we know the tedious struggle of producing quality writing. I’m curious about your thoughts on the conclusion of From Pencils to Pixels, where Baron reveals that “Teachers preferred pencils without erasers, arguing that students would do better, more premeditated work if they didn’t have the option of revising” (31).

Most of us have been in the position of writing something the night or hours before it’s due and ending up with a decent, sometimes great final product. Experiences like this seem to oppose the current method of producing multiple drafts of a piece. Should this procedure be left as a personal preference rather than a requirement?

In Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, which concerns itself with talent and success, he proposes the 10,000 hours theory–essentially to become an expert at something, a person needs to practice the skills of this field for 10,000 hours. He adds though, that the practice needs to be “deliberate practice”–working on the skills where you are weakest, not simply repeating the skills you’ve mastered.

Could the allowance of drafting and revisions weaken the teaching and learning of writing by forcing students to go through a process that might not be contributing to the refinement of their style?

Near the end of Hyper and Deep Attention, Hayles describes different types of new interactive lectures where students participate in the learning process by looking up and sharing relevant material and comments through linked computers and screens. It’s a strange concept to me–it seems like these methods would be distracting more so than helpful and diminish the purpose of attending a class as opposed to just Googling what you’d like to know.

It doesn’t seem like the alternative methods detailed on page 196 promote interaction among the students and professor so much as interaction with a device of some kind. If someone starts presenting information, how useful is it to immediately start your own research on the topic while the lecture is still in progress? Why is commentary being a passive, background activity instead of a live conversation that engages the entire group?

The push to integrate more and more technology into classrooms seems to enable diffused attention. Perhaps students are becoming less and less able to have deep attention because their classes are being made into hyper attentive experiences.

In some ways, the difference between the previous generation and our generation’s experience of learning is personal responsibility–we need to learn to invest attention more deliberately instead of requiring more and more stimuli. According to the reading, less than 10% of the population has an identifiable disorder that prevents them from being able to focus themselves. It might be the comment by the professor who assigns short stories instead of novels, but I think the concessions being made to cater to those without focus are getting out of hand.

At what point can we say that young people need to learn the skill of deep attention instead of adapting teaching methods to a ridiculous extent?

Looking over the reading material provided on the Tar Heel Reader site, I don’t see it as a valuable resource for people who are learning to read. It works well as a repository of practice sentences, but lacks features that would motivate students. The similar structure and minimal content of the books provided on the site fail to present reading as an engaging or important experience.

Each page of a reading consists of a large stock photo above a bland 3-7 word sentence of the form subject-verb-either adjective/direct object/predicate nominative. Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” exactly how I would describe the collections of sentences offered as books from Tar Heel Reader.

It’s not only an issue of this site, but a trend in the materials created for beginning readers. Last week I wanted to pick up a Halloween themed book to read with a 6 year old child I babysit because she’s been learning to read and asked if we could practice together. The only books I could find that were suggested for her age-range had less than 40 words in them. They had 2-4 words per page and usually repeated many of these words.

When I was learning to read, I read from Winnie the Pooh, Beatrix Potter, and Dr. Seuss. These had more than 40 words on a page, and except for Green Eggs and Ham, most of them presented a large variety of words, phrases, and sentence structures. Not only did they challenge me with their structure and semantic content, I wanted to move further in the stories they held. Some of these newer readers have a unified concept, but not much of an engrossing story–This is a cat. The cat is lost. The cat is sad. The cat sees a path. The cat finds its home.

I don’t feel that the material on the Tar Heel Reader site, or a lot of the readings made to help beginning readers stimulate them enough to motivate them to learn basic literacy skills, let alone engender a life-long, positive relationship with reading. For younger students, the books are just flat, for older students, such as adults who are learning to read, the simplicity of these stories could be insulting.

Are there advantages to using materials like those provided by the Tar Heel Reader site? Why do you think there may have been a shift from using more substantial texts to teach beginning readers to more simplified books? What sort of materials did you use when learning to read?

While Wolf’s approach to literacy development reminded me of why I study English–I love it and it makes me feel loved–it’s troubling how she glosses over the unfortunate situation of those who don’t have the warm, cuddly early experience with literature that produces the emotional attachment that encourages a positive association with reading and writing.

It’s clear that children who don’t experience reading early, and ideally with loved ones, are at a profound disadvantage to those who do, but solutions aren’t offered to make up the deficit.

Does this mean that there is no strategy to get these particular children at pace with children that have literacy exposure? What can educators do to balance this extreme lack?

Four hours of every one of my weekdays is wasted. I have to commute by bus from the South Hills because I’m unable to drive. It’s two hours in to Oakland, and two hours back at night. The bus is stalled twice on it’s way into town by construction, so this time often stretches into 4 and half, 4 and three quarter hours. It’s inconvenient. It’s annoying. It makes me want a driver’s license more than a degree.

This lack of a relatively common and increasingly necessary ability parallels the difficulties experienced by Purcell-Gates’ observed mother-son pair of Jenny and Donny. Like Jenny, I’m often dependent on other people to provide their skills for me to complete basic tasks–going to the grocery store, seeing a doctor, going anywhere in less than 2 hours.

Perhaps it’s youthful impatience or naivete, but I can’t understand why the daily inconveniences of not being able to read or write weren’t enough of an incentive for either Jenny to seek literacy instruction sooner or for her to at least make sure Donny received better instruction.

Donny Sr.’s decision to rescue books from construction sites and the collection of children’s literature in the attic suggest that the family sees literacy as important. Even though the parents had low literacy, they exposed the children to books and reading (or at least storytelling). It seems like in this household positive associations were made with literacy, but for some reason the children still didn’t gravitate toward these skills.

A supportive environment wasn’t beneficial. Purcell-Gates emphasized the importance of both access to literary material as well as a positive attitude toward reading in a child’s environment to spur achievement in literacy skills, but those don’t seem to be the only factors that could encourage literacy.

Why don’t the negative consequences of being low or non-literate sufficiently compel people to learn to read and write? Why weren’t the efforts made by Donny Sr. and Jenny enough to encourage the children to read? Are there other essential factors that create strong readers and writers that Purcell-Gates does not consider?

An interest in horses spurred my interest in reading.

When I was six a drive-in movie theater about an hour from my house started a weekly event where they would show children’s movies from a few years prior for only a dollar per person. The first film they planned to show was an adaptation of Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty. Having the common girl-hood obsession with horses, I was adamant about seeing it. My parents were adamant about not driving an hour from home for a picture show.

In order to encourage the trip, I struck a deal. That school year I was behind in my reading classes, and I proposed that if I could read Black Beauty, by myself, before the movie’s premiere a month away, they would take me to see it. Each night my parents would give me a half hour to read to one of them; it was slow going at first, but eventually I did finish the book. It was past the month mark, but my parents appreciated the effort I put into the project and took me to the movie.

As I remember, I was underwhelmed with the feature.

Wanting to relive the story the way I liked it, I read through Black Beauty again over the next few weeks. Being able to have my own version of that story, one I liked better than other people’s tellings, inspired me to find new stories and create personal versions of those as well.

It wasn’t the most noble entry into the LitLife, but bargaining for a movie ticket forced me to recognize my own insight and explore the personal relationships I have to that stories I read.