Honeycutt 1

Garrett Honeycutt Muesing English 1101 September 21, 2013 Literacy: What It Means to Me Have you ever sat down and thought about a persons identity and the fingerprints behind the persons identity? Just how each person has their own identity, they also have their own way of learning new skills and committing them to memory in a way that is familiar to that person. The best way to learn something new is to practice at it or repeat it over and over again until it cant escape your mind. In this particular case; influences from people, reading articles, and board games are what have helped contribute to my literacy experience. Whenever I think about the word literacy, I think about my US History class from high school. One day in class, the teacher made us take the US Immigration Literacy Test to see if we could pass an immigration acceptance test. My earliest memory of my first stages of becoming literate were when my mom would read me bedtime stories. She would start by reading me one book and each night after she read the book to me, she would help me learn the words to where I could eventually read the entire book by myself. Even though these were childrens books with more pictures than words, it was still a fun and easy way of learning to read and comprehend what I was reading. As I got older, the books got tougher and by the time I was able to attend kindergarten, I could read and write fairly well. The most fun I ever had with reading was in kindergarten where kids were awarded badges for the amount of pages they read in a week from a book of their choice. The goal of the whole program was to encourage kids to read in order to

Honeycutt 2

achieve an award at the end of the year with the award being a pizza party. Being the competitive person I am, this challenge was one that I wanted to accept and prove to myself that I had what it took to reach my goal. At the end of the year I finished with 150 points (badges were based on a five point system), which equaled 30 badges. I believe the highest number of badges a kid could receive was 40 (200 points), but even though I didnt get all of them, I still had fun reading and accepting the challenge. Moving on to my elementary school years, grades three through five, I became interested in the genre of mystery books which included The Boxcar Children and The Magic Treehouse series. While reading these book series, I often encountered words that I wasnt familiar with and words that seemed hard to make sense of. In the article Reading Hate it talks about how kids learned words just as they learned how to talk; by meeting them over and over again, in different contexts, until they saw how they fitted. I believe this to be true because the more a person reads, the more of a vocabulary they will have because of the constant meeting of repetitive words. The greater vocabulary a person has the more accurately they will be able to read and understand the book proposed. Im not exactly sure why the genre of mystery interested me so much, but I do know that it kept me interested to the point where I did not want to put the book down. Back during the early stages of school reading was fun and exciting, but little did I know that reading would soon become more of a have to than a want to. I was raised in a Christian oriented home where my family and I went to church every Sunday and youth on Sunday nights. I learned to read the bible by learning important verses and reciting all of the books of the bible for an award that would be given out in front of the whole church body so they could see how much we had learned about the bible. My Preacher and Sunday school teacher(s), primarily my mom, were the people that helped me the most to learn

Honeycutt 3

about the bible and how to read it. Anyone that has at least looked inside of a bible knows that it is not the easiest piece of reading to understand, and for me to be able to read parts of it and actually understand it made me proud and confident in myself. One memory I have from my childhood that helped to develop my literacy experience was the board game monopoly. It wasnt just the regular monopoly, it was the dinosaur edition of monopoly. I enjoyed this game mostly because of my love of dinosaurs at the time and my competitiveness to win. From this game I learned how to do basic math and handle money all while having fun. This version of learning proves to be just as successful as stern methods of learning all because the kid is having fun while learning which makes them want to continue to learn. One of the things that I strongly believe in is the use of manors. I have my family to thank for that because anyone that knows me will say I am a polite person which is something I am proud of. Most of the teaching was done by my mother because she was the one that pushed me to be the best I could be with school, church, and life. My dad on the other hand was the one who pushed me in sports mostly, but I learned from the both of them about how to carry myself as a positive person which can relate to a positive literacy experience. They always taught me wrong from right and that in order to achieve the things I wanted in life I had to work hard for it. The most influential person on the writing part of my literacy experience was my senior English teacher Mrs. Hedrick. As a class we wrote on average three to four writings each week in prep for the AP exam at the end of the year. What stood out most about her is that she did not just assign papers and not revise them, she took the time to read each paper and respond personally to it for the students benefit. In the article This Isnt What We Did in High School I disagreed with the opinion of the focus on the paper Mr. MacAndrews students gave. They said that it was busy work and that the teacher had no real emphasis on it, but Mrs. Hedrick put

Honeycutt 4

thought into her feedback she gave us in order to help us learn from our mistakes as writers and to make our essays better pieces of writing. Just like I have my own personal identity, so does my method of learning. I believe that there is no wrong method to learning as long as you learn what you set out to accomplish. Even from behind the bars of a prison camp, Malcom X educated himself in a homemade manor because he was frustrated with himself for not being able to get across the points he wanted to make in his letters to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. He set a goal and met his goal of becoming literate to better himself in a growing society where being literate was becoming the new trend. Just like Malcoms experiences, the memories of my literary experience are what have helped make me the person I am today and are the memories that I hope to retain as guidelines to a successful learning experience in my future.