When I came to this class, I had no clue what I was getting into.  All of the classes that I’ve taken usually consist of teachers standing at the front of a classroom, handing down information from on high that I had to passively write down and comprehend.  I rarely have had a class where I was asked to give my opinion or engage with the material.  On top of this, I never thought of literacy in any context outside of reading and writing.  The first time that we discussed our definitions of literacy, I had no clue what to say.  It wasn’t until Rose’s “I Just Want to Be Average” that I thought of literacy in a deeper context that just reading and writing.  Literacy can open doors and is relevant to everything in my life.  From watching Parks and Recreation to going on the Internet, literacy is important to every aspect of life.  However, I still haven’t come up with a final definition of literacy.  All that I know is that literacy is much deeper than just reading and writing.  I don’t really know where I am going with this post, so I will just end it with this question:  What is literacy to you?

I don’t play video games very often any more.  This isn’t to say that I don’t still enjoy them (although I don’t play games like Call of Duty anymore because I’m not a huge fan of getting cursed out by 11 year old kids).  When I was younger, I would play video games all the time.  From 8 to 14, I was the poster child for hyper attention.  But, now that I’m older and don’t have nearly enough time to spend 3 hours a day slaying monsters or shooting Nazis, I don’t really miss it very much.  However, for as long as I’ve liked video games, I’ve always loved reading.  From Stephen King to Suzanne Collins, reading has been something that has stuck with since I was a little kid and got my first Harry Potter book.  Unfortunately, I feel like I’m in the minority.

When I come home from college, I occasionally hang out with a couple of my neighborhood friends.  However, when I say hang out, I don’t really mean the normal definition.  Usually, when this group of friends gets together, we either do one of two things:  watch something mind numbing on Netflix or play something mind numbing on Xbox.  And they seem okay with it.  All of these guys are one or two years younger than me, but they remind me so much of myself when I was age 8-14.  When we get together, everything is hyper-attentive.  Deeper meaning be damned.  I mean, why think when you can shoot your friend in the face and make jokes at his expense?  While I’m fine with playing video games every once in a while, the constant desire for hyper-attentive media overloads me, and I’m almost glad whenever I am able to leave their company to spend time with my family or other friends who don’t do that.  I’m not saying that hyper-attentiveness is a problem; I just personally can’t handle nearly as much of it as some other people can.  But maybe I’m just weird.

Now for some questions.  Does this story ring a bell with anyone?  Do you feel as though the over-saturation of hyper-attentive media has had any negative impacts on the desire of our generation or younger generations to spend time on deep attention media?  Also, is it just me or does this overflowing amount of desire for hyper attention mainly come from high school age people and younger?

After reading Purcell-Gates’s article “A World Without Print,” I spent some time reflecting on how much reading is taken for granted in my life.  Just contemplating how different my life would be if I wasn’t able to read is a daunting task in and of itself.  When you really think about it, our society revolves around being able to read.  Even things like texting (something that I spend hours of my day doing without even realizing it) require the ability to formulate communication through the act of reading.

On a whole, our society has become far more dependent on the ability to read in order to be able to function.  When I really think about it, I can’t name a single action that I perform on a daily basis that doesn’t require any type of reading.  Even simple acts like listening to music require the baseline reading literacy in order to be able to find the artist or song that I am looking for.  I know that the family in the article developed processes to get around reading:  for example Jenny would memorize most things instead of writing them down.  The family also had some functional level of reading, to the point that Jenny knew what some words represented and could piece together concepts when she really needed to.  But, for them, reading wasn’t a integral part of life; reading was a fringe actions at best to their family.

Personally, I can hardly fathom life without reading.  Reading was such a fundamental part of my life from such an early age that the idea of not having it would completely change the trajectory of my life.  For one thing, I would be writing this.  In fact, I almost definitely wouldn’t be an English major (or even in college, for that matter) if I couldn’t read.  All of my hobbies would have to be completely different.  I feel like, without reading, I would be only living half a life.  Now for some questions.   Can you think of some things that you do during your daily life that don’t require any reading whatsoever?  How would your life change if reading wasn’t an integral part of your daily functioning?  If you weren’t able to read outside of a very baseline functional level, what are some of the actions that you would have to take in order to compensate?

In “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” Merrill Sheils paints a very bleak picture for the development of writing and literacy as a whole.  Although I would argue that we aren’t quite as screwed as this article implies, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid about how accurate some parts of this article were.  At the end of spring semester last year, one of my roommates asked me to read over one of his papers for a discussion class that he was taking.  I remember being shocked by some of the things that I saw in it.  Nothing was cited, and half of the essay read like something an 8th grader would have written.  When I asked him how he did on his other essays for the class, he told me that his teacher gave him A’s and thought his writing was the best in the class.  Granted, my friend is an Engineering Major, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know how to format an essay properly.

As of recently, there has been a drastic transition in middle and high schools away from English and Writing and into Science and Math.  Out of all of my friends from high school and college, I am one of (if not the only) person taking a non-science or math major.  These are people who can tell you everything in the entire world about Organic Chemistry, but are terrified if they ever have to put that information into an essay.

On top of all of this, technology isn’t doing us any favors.  Due to spell check and text language, teaching spelling and grammar has seemingly become unimportant.  It doesn’t matter if you know how to spell a word; it just matters that you can see the little red squiggly mark under the word.  (As a matter of fact, that same red squiggly line just popped up when I completely botched the spelling of the word squiggly.)  Likewise, texting has relegated “proper English”  to second class status.  My mom was telling me the other day how her 60 year old boss sent her emails with OMG and LOL in them.  If executive partners in law firms feel like it’s okay to say LOL in their correspondence with employees, what’s to stop high school and college students?

I know that this has been less of a question and more of a tirade, and for that I apologize.  But I think that actual English is starting to become a thing of the past, which makes me sad.  Now for some questions:  1.  From your time in middle and high school (or even college for that matter), do you feel like the teaching focus has shifted off of learning how to write onto learning other topics, such as science and math?  2.  Do you think the creation of things like spell check has impacted the development of spelling and grammar abilities?  If so, is there anything we can do about it?  If not, are there any other technologies that have impacted your writing?  3.  Do you think that things are as dire as Sheils put them in “Why Johnny Can’t Read?”  Does the fact that that essay is from the 70s impact its validity in any way?

‘Murica.  Land of the free, home of the brave.  For me, being American was something that I was born with.  It wasn’t something I had to earn or struggle for in any way, shape, or form.  In “‘American by Paper’: Assimilation and Documentation in a Biliterate, Bi-Ethnic Immigrant Community,” this concept of American is flipped on its head.  For the people in this essay, being American isn’t something you are born with (for the most part).  Being American is something that is earned, either through marriage, family connections, or testing.  To become American for these people, there are a few things that have to be done first.  The main roadblock to Americanization for most of the people in this essay is a naturalization test, an examination that involves things such as “paying a hefty fee ($675 as of this writing), reading sentences in English, writing dictated sentences in English, and orally answering civics and history questions in English,” (57).  The problem, though, is that the vast majority of the people taking this test can barely read English, much less write sentences and answer history questions.

So, let’s say the person passes this seemingly arbitrary test, achieving their papers and becoming “American.”  What happens next?  Cristina, one of the people in this essay, sums up this feeling of being “American” very eloquently:  “I’m American by paper, not because I was born here. So I’m still an immigrant. I’m like [new Brazilian immigrants]. I just have a piece of paper that I’m American [. . . .] I’m not American. I just have the papers by law,” (58).  So, Cristina paid a large sum of money, took a test, and gained official documentation, but she still feels less American than me, someone who didn’t actively do anything to become American.  Why is it that earning Americanization feels less legitimate than having it given to you at birth?  What does the fact that the naturalization test can only be taken in English say about America’s position on other cultures and different languages?  What does the fact that “marriage to a U.S. citizen, not education, seems like a surer path to the rights and privileges of the legally document U.S. mainstream” say about our priorities in regards to the development of education and literacy for immigrants?  And finally, does any of this change the definition of what truly “being American” is?

I would like to spend this journal space writing about the concept of rereading.  In the article “Literacy and the Individual Conscious,” F. Niyi Akinnaso writes about his experience with literacy throughout the course of his life.  One specific instance of developing literacy he discusses is in regards to his reading (and subsequent rereadings) of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Akinnaso wrote that the first time he read Animal Farm, he read a simplified version of novel at face value.  To his mind, Animal Farm was just a novel about talking animals.  However, upon subsequent readings (after having acquired more literacy), Akinnaso found the satirical nature of the piece; eventually developing enough that he could “‘read’ beyond the story” and discuss the text critically (151).  While I have never read Animal Farm personally, this concept of rereading after having obtained more literacy is an interesting concept that I would like to discuss in more detail.

In all honesty, I don’t often reread books. However, I have found that the books that I have taken time to go back and read again have been just as (if not more) interesting the second time around.   I feel like the same applies to other pieces of art (including but not limited to movies, television shows, and songs).  Although I don’t reread books very often, there are plenty of movies that I have seen multiple times, as well as many shows that I have watched for second or third times.  I feel that with every subsequent viewing, I become more and more literate with the specific piece at hand.  Because of this, I am able to appreciate these pieces for more than just their surface value.  I specifically remember this concept in regards to the movie Fight Club.  The first time I watched the movie, I spent the entire time following the plot, and not paying attention to some of the subtle details that the director placed into the film.  Upon second and third viewings, however, I focused less on the plot, which gave me the ability to appreciate the movie as more than just a story.  It went from being a sequence of events into a full movie, a full art form.

Now for some questions:  Firstly, what are some things that you that you have reread/rewatched?  Has subsequent encounters with this work changed your viewpoint on it?  Finally, does the act of rereading or rewatching help to develop literacy, or does your literacy level at determine what you get out of a work?  In other words, do you think that it was Akinnaso’s rereading of Animal Farm that helped him be able to critically discuss the novel, or did it have more to do with the level of literacy development of Akinasso as a whole (ie. Through school and other readings) that made him able to critically understand the novel on a deeper level?

When I was four, I could “read” pretty well.  However, when I say “read” I don’t mean in the normal way.  Ever since I was a little kid, my parents would read Thomas the Tank Engine and Angus books.  I specifically remember some of the Angus books that were read to me when I was a little kid.  For those who don’t know, Angus was a little Scottie dog who constantly went on adventures.  In retrospect, Angus didn’t have very good owners, because he was constantly either getting in trouble or getting lost.  My parents would read these stories to me so many times that I eventually ended up memorizing all of the words in the stories.  I got to the point that I would “read” these pictures books back to my parents straight from memory.   I didn’t know how to actually read, but I was fantastic at “reading” these Angus books back to my parents.   Fortunately, I learned quickly how to read things that I hadn’t just memorized, and am now an avid reader.  My parents still tell me about the millions of times that they read these same picture books to me, and I can now look back on those times and say they were my first experience with literacy.