Example Student Literacy Autobiography #3

My Literacy Autobiography
Like so many American children, Dr. Seuss greeted me at the door as I made my way across the threshold into the world of literacy. For me there is life before Green Eggs and Ham and there is life after; I was in Preschool, at a doctor’s office, and I remember wood paneling. Crossing the threshold was the first step on a very long road that I continue to travel. My public education in many ways shaped my literacy and informs how I will promote the literacy of others as I assume the role of teacher

Six is a tough age for anyone, but it was a particularly turbulent year for me. When I was six my mom got remarried. I had to leave behind my best friends, Alex and Michelle, and we moved an hour away to a new city. The ultimate blow came when we went to enroll me in the elementary school I’d be attending; they wanted me to enroll in KINDERGARTEN! I was devastated! I’d already spent two years attending ABC preschool and I was ready to move on. My main point of grievance: I wanted to learn how to read!

I don’t remember not being able to read but I remember weeping bitterly as I left the building and stuttering through sobs, “But Mom, I want to learn how to read!” She looked at me and seeing at once my sincerity and despair she did what any good mother (who is literate enough in the public educational system’s language of power) would do: she grabbed my hand and we turned around and marched right back into the building. I guess they administered some test and I guess I must have done well enough on it, because that fall I entered into the first grade.

Mrs. Fisher’s first grade class was conveniently divided into reading groups according to skill level. Each group had their own workbook that was distinguished by a band of color at the top of the cover. It was no secret that the best readers in the class used the red workbooks. When I entered that classroom there was no red workbook for me. Not by a long shot I had to prove my worth from the ground up. Maybe my first workbook was green. I don’t remember because it wasn’t long before I could tell I was reading out loud faster and with better inflection and articulation than the other students in my group by the end of the school year I had caught up with the best readers in my class and moved on to the coveted purple workbook that was an even higher reading level than the red. The compliment was not lost on me, I was fully aware that I had been pegged a “good reader.”

This is a significant point for any child in their educational career. The time when they are first given the opportunity to express their abilities and as they succeed, or fail, begin to take on titles and labels that they will carry with them throughout their lives. Climbing to the top of my class in reading level, having started at the bottom, was no small feat for me. With confidence, I can say it had a deterministic influence on the rest of my education, perhaps even enabling me to become more literate than I would have been otherwise.

How was I able to read so well so fast? Was it the desire to read and to learn that I had felt so passionately when faced with the possibility of being denied access for another year? Was it a natural proclivity? In my case I think that one deterministic factor was my family’s value for reading.  

My step father made a rule that if we wanted to watch TV at night we had to read for one hour in our rooms after we got home from school. So every Saturday when my brother and I would go to Indianapolis to visit our dad he would take us to the bookstore where we would buy a new book for the week. By the time I was in fourth grade I had read the entire Goosebumps and Bailey School Kids series in those afterschool hours. My mother is also one of the most well-read individuals I have ever met and with her collection of literature we had a library at home. I had access to books. It was at home where I first found and read Animal Farm, years before I’d ever have to read it in school. It was in my home where I first found tomes of Anais Nin and Anna Karenina.

No amount of parental influence, however, could ever surpass my interest in free pizza. One reoccurring pattern in my literacy history was the use of extrinsic motivations. In elementary school I participated in the Book It program where you were rewarded for reading books with free personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut. For me this program worked like a charm.  When I entered middle school and high school, I think that grades became an extrinsic motivator.
Now as I prepare to step into my career as an educator my understanding of what it means to be literate has expanded and I sense a responsibility to assist my students in developing their own literacy. The important patterns I found in my own literacy history are, the powerful influence of labels and early experiences of children on their literacy, the importance of familial values, and most importantly the misuse of extrinsic motivation that does not foster an authentic literacy development. I say most important because as a Geography or a History teacher, I have most control over that part of the equation.

I hope to avoid relying on extrinsic motivators. Instead, my goal is to help my students experience the joy of literacy. People want acceptance and to feel worthy, in my classroom I will help students see that being literate engenders self-confidence and self-respect. People want to feel a sense of power and control, in my classroom I will help students see that in knowing how to access and interpret information and make connections and understand their world in context with its history or geography they can tap into that power and control they are starving for. I’ll do this through carefully constructed curriculum that is driven by excessive use of primary sources and teaching students how to interpret and contextualize them. My goal will be to make the material important to them by connecting it to current events and things that affect their lives.