Autobiography

My earliest literacy experience was when I was about three or four. My parents would read to me fairytales at night. A fairytale story which I remember was about Cinderella from a Disney book. The thing that really caught my attention was the pictures in this book. I believe that this was the first sign, that I would become a visual learner.

When I started kindergarten the teacher assigned an alphabet journal. The assignment was designed to have students begin to learn how to write the alphabet letters. For every letter in the alphabet you had come up with five pictures that began with that specific letter. I remembered how excited and intrigued I was by this project because it help me learn how to relate pictures to words and ultimately help me read words.

In first grade,I remember struggling with literacy specifically with phonics. My first grade teacher had a very thick accent that affected my understanding because of her pronunciation.. Overall my grammar school experience was not a very pleasant one when it came to literacy. In high school I began to look to at literacy from a different perspective. The teachers taught outside the box. I remember my 11th grade English teacher teaching the concept of tragedy. She did it by showing the movie West Side Story. Then, instead of having us write a summary of the film, she had us do a power point presentation of the film using different English themes during the presentation, I loved this project because it helped me to relook at literacy in a different light.

Once I got to college I began to appreciate literacy from the internet. It was becoming mainstream and user friendly.

Now attending graduate school, literacy has presented another challenge. I find that not only you need to read the material you need comprehend it as well. Once that has been done, then you use inductive and deductive reasoning to understand it and be able to explain it. I find this a little difficult coming from a criminal justice background, where the literature is straightforward. However, I’m interested in learning in this class . Based on the class discussion I believe that I will feel differently about literacy in graduate school because I will be able to analyze and synthesized the literature as it is presented.