Excelled Literacy: A Help or a Hindrance?
I am six. The teacher has a long wooden stick that she uses to point at the words. The book towers in front of me, propped up on an easel, white and black and gleaming. The words fly from my lips with ease: red, blue, go, fish. I beam at the teacher’s praise.
My first parent/teacher/student conference. My mom nods her head seriously as my 1st grade teacher tells her my dreams of becoming a writer and how to help me reach my high aspirations. I start producing my first chapter that very week.
My throat is large and swollen and pink. Today is the day I’m supposed to read my short story aloud to my 2nd grade class during sharing time, and I have laryngitis. Worry flops around my stomach like a fish as I think of someone else trying to read it for me—they will get all the voices wrong, they won’t know where to put the right emphasis. I wrote 9 pages for a 2-page assignment and want all the credit.
It is difficult to remember a time when I couldn’t read and write or when I wasn’t good at it. Even my own mother doesn’t remember, though she is pretty sure I just learned to read in kindergarten (it was my oldest brother who learned to read at two and a half, probably because he was the only child at the time. I was the fifth). Every teacher I ever had marveled at my supposed gift with words; I guess I just got used to hearing it. Because of the constant encouragement I received, I started to put more and more time and effort into my writing projects, which only increased the praise I received, which only increased my desire to keep succeeding. This cycle of praise and effort has pushed me throughout my educational career, for better or for worse.
I was talking to my husband one weekend as we were driving through Sardine Canyon about what my life would have been like had I not been praised as a child for certain things: math, English, obedience. Would I have excelled at these things just the same? Or would the lack of praise and encouragement have stifled my motivation to learn? My husband talked about his own childhood—how the only thing he could ever remember being praised for was his ability to be happy all the time (quite a talent, indeed, though not one as readily noticed and encouraged in the public school system). He said he never once was praised for his work in any one subject area in school, and from kindergarten through 12th grade, he seemed to coast through his classes, not too smart, not too dumb. He is now planning on pursuing a combined Master’s/PhD degree in Physical Therapy and works hard to maintain an almost straight-A average. We did wonder though: would he have excelled earlier on had one single teacher noticed a talent and commented on it?
I, on the other hand, received an almost embarrassing number of comments and compliments on my literacy skills throughout my education. For example, I have an enemy-turned-friend that tells me she used to hate me because my teacher used my spelling test as the key in 3rd grade. In almost every English class I have been in, my teacher has asked to use my essay/poem/story as an example to show future classes (or current classes, which was always mortifying). I am sure that these early experiences only helped to encourage my love for the skills I was best at. But writing was not the only thing I seemed to excel at: partly thanks to external rewards offered for the most books read (like personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut) and partly thanks to my own affinity with reading, I read voraciously from the time I started school. In one particular year (I think I was in middle school), I read no less than 192 books.
It would be easy for me to assume that it was just my “destiny” to become an English teacher or become a published author (although neither has happened . . . yet), but I know from my studies in psychology and my familiarity with literacy that it might not be so simple. I have learned in my education classes that children whose parents read to them show marked advantages in vocabulary, communication, and reading ability; additionally, these children also tend to get better grades and have a higher success rate in school. My mom read to me from a very young age, as did my older siblings. I remember that on long road trips, my mom would read to us in the car to pass the time—books like The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Twenty-One Balloons. We also had a house stuffed full of books—we had bookshelves in nearly every room of our home, filled with everything from picture books to easy chapter books to complex classics. I saw both of my parents reading for their own personal pleasure almost every day—each had his/her own stack of books piled up on the nightstand by their bed. Looking at even deeper issues, I grew up in a white, middle-class neighborhood that promoted the dominant culture in every way, so I never felt marginalized for my love of reading or for the fact that I excelled in school. These factors all contributed to an environment where my talent for reading and writing could flourish without obstacles.
Until very recently, I had always attributed my successes in the language arts to good genes and my own personal hard work. Although these things have definitely played a significant role, I now know that having those other factors in my life (growing up in a middle-class neighborhood and having college-educated parents, to name two) significantly increased my opportunities for learning higher literacy skills. I also was blessed with teachers and parents and friends who praised and inspired my efforts in literacy. Although how literacy is gained and improved upon is a complex, many-sided issue, I am the first to admit that I have been blessed with almost every factor in my favor, which has helped me to become the kind of reader and writer that I am today.
These positive early experiences in literacy skills will help shape my future as a teacher because they have inspired a passion within me that I hope will be contagious to my students. I know that from my own experiences as well, I will be able to create and give out more challenging assignments to those students whose reading and writing abilities beg for such complex tasks. I will admit, however, that I will need to learn more skills in how to reach out to students who are not so skilled at reading and writing; having come from the opposite end of the spectrum, my experiences with the language arts have been limited, so I will need to learn how to best help those students who struggle to improve and excel as well. In the end, I am hoping that my talents and background with reading and writing will help, rather than hinder, my efforts as a future educator in the public school system.
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