Literacy Autobiography

Book-Shaped Present

When I think of books, I think of Christmas. My immediate family is full of avid readers, myself included. It is almost an inevitability in my family that a good number of the presents under the tree on Christmas morning will be books. The inevitability that follows is what we call the “Great Christmas Freeze-out.” After opening their presents, the book readers retreat to quiet nooks and corners to break into their new treasures. It only recently occurred to me that most families probably spend a lot more time talking to each other on Christmas Day than we do.

I don’t have a distinct memory of learning to read, perhaps because I began reading around the same time kids begin developing long-term memories. To me, reading was just something I did, and in my family, something most people did. My maternal grandparents were both published writers who wrote for the fishing and hunting industries most of their professional lives, and the three things I remember their house being full of was guns, rods, and books. I think this is the reason my father, a born and bred Lancaster County boy, was able to get along so well with my mothers family. He didn’t have much in common with them (especially the guns and the rods), but he had the books. They loved to talk literature and my grandmother loved never having to agonize over a present for my dad come Christmas time.

I don’t think I truly appreciated this attitude towards literacy in my house until I went to college. Announcing my intention to declare a writing minor was met with praise, rather than the disdain I can imagine and have heard tales of in other families. In my family there was no question that skill at writing was not only valuable, but viable as a career path.

Dewey Decimal

My first memory of the library is of going to a “bedtime story” club at the small neighborhood library down the block from our first house. A group of neighborhood children and their parents met up in the basement of the little library to hear a bedtime story, the kids all decked out in their jammies. Most of us lived so locally that we walked to the library for the club, a parade down Broad Street of parents and their children all dressed for bed. I think maybe that was weird now, though I guess it wasn’t at the time.

When the library down the street closed down, my dad started taking me to the large public library in Lancaster city. I remember thinking it was a palace of a place with great marble steps and three giant floors filled with books. The children’s section upstairs was where I started, but I have stronger memories from this place in my high school years, coming here for hours to do research for term papers on subjects from John Berryman to A Streetcar Named Desire (I suppose I had a penchant for the dramatic as well as symbolism, apparently). I remember walking the long stacks of reference books, and shuddering when my call number directed me to the basement, with its newspapers on rods and homeless guys napping. But I loved it, the safety and anonymity of the stacks of books. You could disappear for hours and no one would know, no one would even stumble upon you.

To this day I find comfort in the peace and quiet of the library. A year or so ago, I was home on break, driving around aimlessly and having a particularly existential moment. I began to panic, about my life, about my major, about having just two years left to decide my life’s trajectory. I found myself in the Mountville Library, the one my mom used to bring my brother and I to every week, the two of us always entering and leaving with stacks of books piled up in our arms. The same library where I worked my way from kids stories to young adult fiction to real fiction when I started to find the young adults petty and predictable. I grabbed a seat at a table and just took it in for a moment. Then I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn for the umpteenth time and walked out feeling immensely better about my situation.

The Letter “r” Does NOT Look Like That

To this day, when in conversation my friends and I stumble upon the topic of handwriting, two subjects inevitably come up: elementary school and the SAT’s. Drastically different times in a scholar’s life, linked only by the fact that they were the only exposure we’d ever have to cursive handwriting. Handwriting samples in elementary school were the bane of my existence, the copying of script and getting it sent back from the mysterious grading center with commendation being one particularly frustrating thing I couldn’t master no matter how hard I tried. No matter how painstakingly long I took to form my letters, my samples never came back. I tried with a vengeance for a few weeks, before realizing that it was probably never going to happen for me. I held the pencil wrong, the teacher said. And she was right, but for the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to change it. Despite teachers’ warnings and special pencil grips my mother bought, to this day my hand still cramps from having two fingers wrapped around the pencil rather than three placed gracefully, holding it comfortably.

Being forced to produce these samples at the same time personal computer technology began making them obsolete lent a special kind of futility to the exercises. However the effect of this is one we didn’t realize until ten years later when we had to write a sentence, ONE SENTENCE, in cursive. For most of us, it took the whole time block, and more than the shaded block of allotted space on the answer grid to finish our sentence, an ungraded proclamation that we would not cheat on the exam. To this day, we half-joke that it was the hardest part of the test. Who knew we were practicing, all those years ago?

Living Fiction

Like most kids in general and writers in particular, I kept a notebook/journal of sorts as a kid. However, my journal was not a “Dear Diary” type of deal, it was a place for intensely personal thoughts, including itemized lists of my current crushes:
1. Andy T- nice smile, made me mix CD
2. Bryan B- London Calling t-shirt
3. Marcus N- snack bar, free drinks?

However, most of my journal entries took the form of fiction. Even when I was writing about something intensely personal, it was happening to someone else, in some alternate, but completely identical universe. I wrote short stories about school dances, dramatic scenes about failed relationships, there was even a distinct protagonist in my emo high-school poetry. I’m sure a shrink would have something to say about this, but I’m not sure I care to know what it is.

I remember the first story I ever wrote. It was inspired by a particularly tumultuous event in the life of an elementary school student: the loss of a best friend. Now, this was almost on a yearly basis at that age, the title of “best friend” generally being someone who fulfilled three categories:
1. Was in the same class (our school had eight third grades, proximity was essential)
2. Shared the same interests (including but not limited to: foods in the cafeteria, class subjects, boy bands, sports/games, fictional characters)
3. Would totally never, ever talk to your worst enemy
The amount of kids in our school assured that different people would fulfill these qualities each year, and so it seemed inevitable that best friends would change. However, at the beginning of my fourth grade year, I was feeling particularly scorned. My best friend from third grade was not only in a separate class, but a whole other hall, and by the looks of it at the first recess of the year, a new and improved group of friends. My insecurity over this, as well as an unfortunate looking pair of glasses I had acquired over the summer, made me spiteful and vindictive, and I spent he whole recess talking with my new best friend about how stupid her perm looked. That night, I took to my journal with a vengeance, crafting a fictional tale of “former best friends pitted against each other.” The story featured the girls combating each other with pranks and trickery, only to reconcile with each other and themselves at the end. The tale of “Four Eyes and Fuzzhead” will always live with me, both as my first story, and my first foray into using writing to create a more desirable reality.

Fiction and Reality

This penchant for fictitious worlds followed me even to my chosen major and (hopeful) career path film and television writing. The first screenplay I ever wrote was a story of a “popular” girl who gets cancer, making her feel guilty and have to make up for terrible way she’s treated others (only to wake up and realize the whole thing was just a dream). The main character in the script was a variation on mean girls I knew, and most of the supporting characters were based on people I knew, including myself. To this day I flinch when professors criticize my characters, knowing that there’s a part of me or my friends and family in almost all of them.

I’ve always been curious where this propensity for fiction comes from. I wonder if, in studying the background and literary roots of authors today, a common link could be found between those who choose fiction over non-fiction. Surely, there are some people who are inclined to be writers and some who are not, but I wonder if there exists an inclination for the type of writing these people feel compelled to do. Perhaps the kids who find comfort in fictional worlds of reading in their youth are the ones who grow up and strive to make similar utopias for new generations of readers. Maybe fiction writers are the most elaborate escapists. Or maybe it’s just in my blood.

"Unskilled" Writers

What struck me most about this article was the way in which the author talked about the "unskilled" writers in this study. I think too often we think of skill writing and composing in the same way as reading, where there is a clear cut way to tell whether you are doing it right or wrong.However, I think composing words should be thought of in a more artistic way, like composing music. Sure, maybe it isn't how you'd do it, and maybe it doesn't sound great, but that doesn't make it any less of a composition. I have a real problem with trying to quantify and study the process of writing, as the process and product is unique to each individual.

One of the most fascinating observations about the writers in this study to me was the disconnect between speech and writing. Tony, the subject who was singled out, had a practice of "reading in" proper words and punctuation, but could not physically see where they were wrong on the page. I suppose this is one of the greatest struggles for those who learn how to write later in life, the ability to know what you mean, but the inability to put it on paper.

Writing as a Mode of Learning

What I understood of this article, I thought was very interesting. I find it fascinating that, of the four "languaging processes" that she discusses, writing is the only one in which the individual is charged with creating physical meaning. The significance of this is not to be overlooked, and it is precisely why being a good reader does not automatically make you a good writer (in the same way being a good listener does not make you a good talker--and vice versa). I also liked the analysis of both left and right brain action and the idea that writing is one of the original processes that uses both hemispheres.

However, though I agree with the argument of writing as a mode of learning, I am hard pressed to think of something I learned through writing. I think the typical educational mindset is that reading is for learning, and writing is for regurgitating, grading, and ranking. Along those lines, if the last article is also to be taken into account, if most students aren't even writing in the correct way, how are they expected to learn anything from it? I suppose it is a less concrete idea than I am making it out to be, however, I would appreciated a little more explanation on practical application from the author,

Process, Not Product

This article really emphasized what I agree to be some of the largest flaws with the way students are taught to write in schools today. From my own experience, I felt my school did a poor job emphasizing the connection (and disconnect) between good literature and good writing. In our English classes, we read the classes, by authors revered as some of the greats. Yet we picked these works apart for structure, symbolism, and semantics so much that by the end, they hardly resembled a composition. Expected to produce essays in nearly all of our classes, we stumbled to piece back together that which we had deconstructed and the results were usually messes of attempted profundity and garbled logic. As we advanced through the grades, we got better at faking it, better at producing what was expected. But I don't truly believe we became better writers.

The sad part of this essay to me is the near impossibility of implementing any of his suggested "implications." In a school system that is heavily grade-centric, letting students write about whatever they want, take however long they need, and take however long they need to complete the assignment is laughable. There needs to be some way to quantify students, to rank them, especially in schools where the numbers shoot high into the triple digits, teaching writing the way he suggests is a wonderful dream, but not one I see coming true.

Remembering Writing, Remembering Reading

Brandt's essay focuses on the progression of reading and writing through childhood and beyond. The basis of her arguments stem from some 400 interviews she conducted with a wide variety of people from a Wisconsin town I assume is meant to represent Anywhere, USA. I have a hard time remembering what might be my "first" writing experience, it seems to me that it has always just been something I did, some "natural extension of language," as Brandt puts it. But as I read, I attempted to recall some of my own writing experiences and the people and events that made me grow as a writer.

She speaks of the "ambiguity" of writing, the indifference with which some people treat it as a skill. I agree that some of the daily activities writing is required for seem mundane, but as a child, I don't ever remember thinking of writing that was something tedious but necessary. I suppose that has a lot to do with circumstance, my parents were both in professions that required extensive writing: my mother a newscaster and my father who graduated with a degree in English and has held a wide variety of jobs from teacher to web developer to marketing executive (all of which involving varying degrees of writing). My maternal grandparents were also both published authors, so it was always an environment where writing was encouraged and, when done well, praised.

As far as school-related writing goes, I assume my experiences are fairly typical: handwriting assignments, the dreaded five-paragraph essays (later, term papers) and projects, etc. However, it was academic writing that first lead me toward what would become my major and my passion: screenwriting. I remember in middle school, every student was required to enter the Pennsylvania Scholastic Writing Competition and submit a piece from any of a dozen or so categories. When we received the list of categories, most of my classmates went straight for the "short short essay" or poetry categories (300-600 words and 100 lines, respectively). However, my eye was drawn to what looked like the most daunting category (and, I remember, the one my teacher said she was sure none of us would attempt): Dramatic Script (50+ PAGES). The script, I remember, was awful, some sob story about a girl who got cancer and repented for her sorry ways, only to wake up and realize it was all a dream. It was a seventh-graders feeble attempt at being profound, but all that mattered tome was that it was a script. I had done it. And I could do it again.

I also remember another writing style from middle school and high school: the "note" (which I passed copious numbers of). It was a large school and once we started switching classes, sometimes you could go a full day without getting a chance to talk to your friends. Notes exchanged as we passed in the hall were the easiest (and most exclusive) way to communicate. In high school, my best friend and I even had a running notebook that we would write back and forth in and exchange. Prior to the text message being invented, notes like this were the easiest form of written communication between peers.

I do empathize with Brandt's conclusion that personal, nonacademic writing is intensely private in nature and hard to qualify because so few want to share. I did have journals as a kid, but used them mostly for "fiction" or sensationalized versions of what was happening in my own life. Fictional or not, they were still intensely private. To this day, I still get a gnawing feeling in my stomach when others read any of my writing, be it script, personal essay, or academic paper. I think these feelings stem from writing because of how terribly subjective it is; the idea that you could pour your heart and soul into a piece that you think is wonderful and someone else could see it as complete drivel is just a little too traumatic for writers to take. That's why, until you have some teacher or peer who tells you what you've written is brilliant, you want to keep it completely to yourself.

Complexion

Complexion discusses the Rodriguez’s experiences with discrimination due to race and more specifically, skin color. I find it interesting that the stigma relating to darkness of skin is almost polar opposite for Caucasians (where a tan complexion is desirable and a sign of wealth and leisure) than for most other ethnic groups (where the dark-skinned ones are thought of as lesser and are often shunned, ashamed).

While I cannot empathize with Rodriguez’s plight as a darker-skinned man, I can sympathize with the emotional repercussions of body image. He states that he “becomes divorced” from a body he is unhappy with. I think this is a common sentiment for children (or people, for that matter) who are upset with their own bodies. The disconnect from yourself, the knowledge that you might be “happy” in a sense, but you’re not happy with who you are, is a dichotomy of emotional turmoil.

Being raised in the heart of the Amish country didn’t bring me much in the way of cultural diversity, but unlike many people’s perceptions of more conservative, rural areas, I was raised to respect all races, religions, creeds, etc. One of the most hurtful things I’ve ever heard was a black girl on my hall freshman year telling me that she had just assumed I was racist, hearing where I was from. My parents were exceedingly tolerant people, and raised me to be one as well. However, I think being raised in such a homogenous area bestowed me with a latent kind of racism, just the unfamiliarity of certain kinds of people makes me curious, fascinated with types of people I’ve never encountered before. I suppose sometimes this over-interest could be construed in the wrong way, however, I am confident in myself and my belief that anyone who would take five minutes to get to know me would realize that my interest is harmless and hardly derogatory.

I find it fascinating that the remarks about his skin color that make the deepest mark on Rodriguez are not the slurs he hears on the street but the ones he hears at home as the women talk about their desire for light-skinned children. Statements like this make me believe that perhaps truly the worst form of racism is that which a group inflicts on itself. But is this true? Is this even racism then? Or should it be “allowed,” overlooked like the appropriation of the N-word in the black community or the tolerance-reversing appeal of Jersey Shore?

The Achievement Of Desire

The Achievement Of Desire describes Rodriguez's educational upbringing as a "scholarship boy," and the emotional toll that comes with playing such a role. He sees his educational success as coming with a heavy burden: the need to constantly be achieving and improving seemingly for the sole sake of continuing on as a scholarship boy, without deriving any real personal pleasure from academic success. He also describes the disconnect between his learning self and his home self, and begins to feel embarrassed and ashamed that his less-educated parents aren't more like the teachers he comes to revere.

I can identify with Rodriguez in some aspects of his intellectual experience, while I do feel there was a point where I surpassed my parents educationally, it was never something I was made to feel ashamed or guilty about. I revered my own teachers, insomuch as I had a burning desire to make them like me, which was part of the reason I strove to be such a good student, but that never detracted from my feelings of love and admiration for my parents. I think a large part of this is the cultural factor, there was nothing as evident as a language barrier to evidence that I had intellectually outgrown my parents, I never felt like my home life changed drastically because of my desire to learn, and I harbor no real nostalgia for my life before schooling.

However, I feel sorry for Rodriguez when he discusses his early experiences with reading. As a child I had some of the same compulsive tendencies when it came to reading “the right book” and would compile lists of books I thought I should read to be a more “well-educated” person. However, unlike young Richard, I hardly even made it through half of these lists. I was incapable of reading just for information, I had to become completely engrossed in a book. For me, reading was an experience to be lost in, to the point where you forget where you are, outside of the fictional world. If the characters, drama and plot weren’t holding my attention, it was onto the next book. I tried (and failed) three times to read Atlas Shrugged before realizing that perhaps some “classics” weren’t for everyone.

After reading this article and looking closer at my own relationship with my parents as well as those of my friends and relatives, I have to wonder what the ideal parent-child dynamic is in regards to education, or if one even exists. In a society that pushes us to always be better, smarter, and more successful than those who came before, it is only natural that there would be some educational disconnect between generations. I have witnessed many vastly different examples of this generation gap, and have yet to see one I would describe as “ideal,” making me wonder if there is such a thing, and if so, what it looks like.