Throughout this entire semester, while we’ve been trying to form a definition of literacy, I have been trying to remember my first memories of reading and hearing my parents and being exposed to books; really all of the scenes that we have heard people recounting. I can’t remember any of it. I know my parents exposed me to books; I have the books to prove it. But I don’t know what they did before I was old enough to form memories. For some reason this bugs me. I want to know because I want to know what I should do with my children or how to approach that with my children. While I don’t need to know how my parents did it to teach my kids, I feel like that would be valuable information to have.

I also spent most of my time in this class trying to think of how I would approach these things with my kids. Would I try to teach them their letters and how to write their name and how to read before they started school? If so, before kindergarten or preschool? There is no solid answer to these questions and this causes me some anxiety because I want to know what to do—I want to be given directions. I don’t want to just do that I think would be best and then see how my kids end up doing, that’s too unpredictable. I’ve seen too many preschool children years behind their peers to leave my children’s reading and writing skills up to chance.

I think my time in this class has taught me that to be a great teacher, I need to take every circumstance into account. If one of my high schoolers is a few reading levels behind or struggles with writing, I need to not assume that they are slow or not doing their homework but that there are these developmental circumstances that may be affecting them. I need to consider these things and build a plan for their improvement around those circumstances. I need to be careful not to make snap judgments. That is the biggest lesson that I have learned in this class, and I really appreciate that.

This week’s articles were very interesting to read because they discuss a change in focus that I have experienced first hand. I am not used to assigned readings being that relatable. However, I think the topic of evolving technology is one that anyone could find a connection to. In the Reading in Slow Motion article, the writer mentions the differences between when she was in college writing a paper and when her daughter was writing a paper in school. I thought it was interesting that she think it’s easier for people to write now because the internet is there and so they have all of the information they could ever want at their fingertips. However, I have to say I think it would maybe be harder now. Or at least, harder to write a good essay now. With so much technology available we are flooded with non-scholarly resources, and too much information. We struggle when writing to stay on topic within the paper because we have read too much; we have too much information floating around our heads. We use too many secondary sources and so not much of our paper is valid.

I say “we” and “our” because I know that me and people I went to high school with struggled with all of these things, so I’m sure people both older and younger than me struggled as well. For example, I know tons of people who use Wikipedia as a source. I was told in seventh grade that Wikipedia was, “the devil.” My seventh grade history teacher told my class that before explaining how people can alter what it says and telling us that if anyone used it on their papers they would fail. To this day I tell people that Wikipedia is evil and they shouldn’t use it, even though it’s my dad’s number one source of information.

I guess my question is: do people think that the internet has also presented its challenges to the academic world?

This week’s reading discusses how using technology has become a factor in the way that youth today form their identities. I was really interested in this, as I have grown up with technology very heavily interwoven into my interactions with my peers as well as my schoolwork. I have had the luxury of typing all short and long essays that I needed to hand in, owning online transcripts of textbooks, and emailing people when I’m too afraid to call them. I was against e-readers, but I eventually submitted to their majesty when I realized how much cheaper books are and the ease of borrowing e-books from the library via Kindle. I would be lost without my laptop or cellphone, and I grew up with much less technology than my brother who is three years younger than me or my nieces who are ten, sixteen, and nineteen years younger than me. I pride myself on knowing what a phone with a cord, a floppy disk, and wired Internet connections are. They will never know this, or if they do it will be from movies and television shows that seem archaic to them.

I worry that their exposure to technology will have a negative effect on their social interactions. As easy as technology makes tons of things, it also makes it really easy to avoid people. Why go outside when you can sit and play games or browse the Internet? Birthday parties and sleepovers took on a different theme once computers were introduced. Cyber bullying is a huge problem that will probably never be tackled as long as face-to-face bullying is still a thing.

I do not think having technology will hinder their learning. I have played educational games on laptops and iPads with my nieces. I know that my stepsister and her husband limit the amount of time their girls spend on the Internet and watch what websites they visit. Unfortunately not all children have this protection. Not all children have someone looking over their shoulder or looking at their browser history to make sure that they’re not wasting their time or being exposed to something they shouldn’t be.

I know there are tons of arguments about the Internet making things too easy or dumbing things down or making too much information available. I don’t know if I agree with these things or not. I think I am not in the position to choose a side as I have grown up surrounded by this technology and therefore would probably be biased. I do, however, think that when children under the age of 15 are on the Internet, measures need to be taken to limit and monitor their usage. They should not have free range.

Growing up my mom always yelled at my brother and I for two things: chewing with our mouths open, and using words like “ain’t”. I would always get annoyed when she corrected me. I did not understand why these things were a problem. If I wanted to chew loudly or with my mouth open, why couldn’t I? If I wanted to speak improperly like the kids I hung out with on the street, why couldn’t I? I never thought that I would one day adopt these qualities I hated so much.

This is what Min-Zhan Lu’s piece reminded me of. How no matter how much we resist our parents qualities or the qualities of our peers we somehow end up adopting them because we are constantly immersed in them.

She tried her hardest to compartmentalize her two languages. Then she tried to follow her school language, but she found that she couldn’t because it was a part of her conscious and her subconscious. She could not really control the switches that turned each section of thinking on and so she would use both her home and school language at once, because they were what shaped her identity.

I am not fluent in a language other than English. I was not really exposed to any foreign languages until high school, and so I cannot fully connect with Min-Zhan Lu’s struggle as a child. I can, however, say that I am in favor of teaching children a second language young. Min-Zhan Lu mentions at the end that her daughter learned English, her second language, easily. Lu also took to English, and the two forms of Chinese that she was taught easily. Children learn languages easier than adults.

I am currently in Intro to Linguistics, and my professor proposed the question of how to approach teaching a second language to children. Which one do you speak at home? Do you speak both at home? What do you speak at school? It was hard to think of answers for these questions. I’d always assumed that learning a second language would be strictly taught in school, but what about children who come to the US and are learning English as a second language? Should parents only speak their native language at home or should they try to speak English or both?

Lu’s parents spoke strictly English and in their bourgeois terms. They did not mix languages except in possible helping with homework. This made things more difficult for her to decide which “side” she agreed with. We have read several pieces in this class that suggest that schools do not support students speaking their native languages in school, so how would a student deal with this? How would a teacher support this?  I think this goes long with questions I have asked before; where the answer lies somewhere in the responsibility for fostering success lies with both teachers and parents.

When Holly came to class she mentioned that the people she worked with, Brian specifically, can write their names but cannot read or really write any other words. I don’t remember if I thought that this was normal or what, because it didn’t strike me as being odd or a literacy trait. Both of the readings this week mention the ability to write/sign one’s own name as being a measurable literacy trait.

Resnick and Resnick say that, “if writing one’s name were what was meant by literacy, we would not be worried that illiteracy was a national problem. Yet the signature was not always a demand easy to satisfy” (371). For some reason, until reading these pieces, I think I saw writing your own name as an inherit ability rather than a learned skill. Even after teaching preschoolers how to identify the letters in their name, describing the shapes to them, and helping them practice writing their names; I somehow never understood that this was something people could not know. Even when reading the Akinnaso piece, I somehow did not grasp this concept when he discussed that in his village the people there would use alternative methods of signing a document because they could not sign their names.

I have a really sketchy memory of learning how to read and write and I think this plays into my understanding, or lack there of, of the process of learning how to sign your own name. I’m sure I didn’t just wake up one day with the ability to read and write perfectly, in fact my time learning was probably gruesome and that’s why I have blocked it from my memory. I do remember that my parents’ signatures always fascinated me and I would practice “cursive” by scribbling lines and curly-ques on paper until I learned how to form my name.

I have noticed lately that not many people sign their names in cursive anymore, but merely print their names. I remember my third grade teacher making such a stink about how important it was to learn cursive and how I was going to need to know for the future, yet I cannot remember a single circumstance where I have needed to write anything in cursive. This is probably a stretch, but I wonder if the lack of people signing their names in cursive is due to a lack of teaching it in schools or if it is merely a preference.

I also wonder if maybe teaching children to write their names is in some way their parents’ responsibilities? And building off of that, teaching them how to read/write. I think today we would say that it is mostly the parents’ responsibility, but reading this week’s pieces it seems that historically it is the responsibility of teachers and schools. Historically children surpass their parents’ literacy by miles, and this trend continues. With that in mind, is it then understandable if parents do not take it upon themselves to teach their children how to read/write and hire someone else to do it instead?  Do children gain something besides bonding time with their parents when they are not the ones who teach them how to read/write? In asking this question I am not assuming that not teaching these skills means not supporting them at home through reading to them or lending help when needed; I mean it in that when parents read to their children they are not setting out with the aim to teach their children to read but simply sharing a book with them.

In Fishman’s essay she mentioned that Amish children’s’ literacy education primarily revolves around developing the ability to read religious texts. Being able to read and interpret texts has been a force pushing people to learn how to read for decades, so that was not particularly surprising. What I found to be surprising was that while Fishman states that Amish families do not go out of their way to expose their children to literacy and that schoolwork and home are two very separate things. It seemed sort of out of place to me that these parents that she was focusing on, the Fishers, would take such care to find appropriate books for their children and make sure they can read and understand the Bible, but then not concern themselves with their children’s school work.

I realize that I worded that in a biased way, “not concern themselves with” but I just can’t understand how the two processes can not be related. To me, a parent that supports literacy and amends family Bible reading and hymn singing activities so that the youngest child can follow along would also be helping them with school work or helping them study or something. But I guess, the more I think about it, parents today who are not Amish do similar things. For instance, all parents want their children to read—I hope. But all parents do not have the interest, time, or energy to help their children with their homework or to ask them about their day or to help them study or even have the faintest idea what is going on in their schooling. Today a lot of parents are working when their kids are at home doing their homework and so they don’t even get the opportunity to talk to them about what they are doing in school of to offer to help them.

In Brandt’s essay last week she found connections between parents sponsoring children’s introduction to reading. While I was reading that I found myself questioning if she had encountered any families who were unable to introduce their children to reading due to the inability to read, or lack of time, or some other factor. In the essay it did not seem so. While the Fishers are not an example of this type of family they too pushed me to question how children in these families are introduced to reading and writing. In class when Professor Vee asked us what/who our sponsors were, if I’m remembering correctly, we all said our parents, grandparents, or school. Are parents, teachers, and religion the only possible sponsors? What then happens if all three of these fail?

When I was in elementary school I played the violin. I played for two years, without learning how to read music. I would practice weekly with my school’s music teacher, perform in seasonal recitals, but never knew how to read music. It was never a problem. I was never reprimanded nor did I feel the need to learn. My music teacher would review a piece every time he introduced a new one by telling us the chords we were supposed to play. I would just memorize the pattern. Occasionally I would write it in my book, or maybe he wrote it in my book because he knew I couldn’t read music. After my second year a new music teacher replaced the old one, and he expected me to be able to read music as I had been playing for two years. I couldn’t, and didn’t want to learn, and so I gave up.

I managed to make it through two years of music practices and recitals without learning how to read music. In class we discussed being literate and being literate in different areas. I think everyone is literate, because everyone has the basic skills to survive, because you need to be literate to some degree in order to communicate with people and go grocery shopping and have any job. But there are definitely different degrees of literacy, why else would there be reading levels? I’ve always wondered why reading levels just kind of stop when you’re in elementary school. Is there just one set level from there on out? Should we all have the skills to read and understand complex works of writing after that?