Literacy Autobiography

I think as a future teacher it is important to be able to look at your own schooling and your own learning experiences growing up in order to reflect on how this has shaped your idea of what a classroom should look like. Your own experiences greatly effect how you approach teaching and the ways you think will be effective to teach. My own experiences with learning to read and write were nothing out of the ordinary but are nonetheless important for me to examine.

I was young for my grade and did not really fully learn to read until first grade. My reading and writing development was typical for my grade level and was by no means above average. However, I always had a very positive attitude towards reading and writing. I had a lot of access to different literature at home and from our public library and my parents helped to shape my positive view towards reading. In addition, my first grade teacher was one of my favorite teachers and I really looked up to her. I remember deciding in the first grade that when I grew up I wanted to be just like her and become a teacher also. This teacher is one of the main reasons I think I have always had such a positive attitude towards reading and writing. She always taught us that reading is fun and meaningful, which is so important to stress in such at an early age. She had us write in journals every day and would read everything we wrote and respond to it or comment on it. We were allowed to write about anything we wanted and she made us feel as if anything we had to say in our writing was important. I loved seeing what she had to say about my writing and looked forward to it. This really got me to be excited about writing and made me want to write more. She always found fun ways to incorporate reading into our classroom activities that made reading seem manageable and enjoyable. After this year my reading improved greatly and I went on to become an advanced reader in older grades.

I was always a very enthusiastic student and was always very motivated from a young age. My attitude towards reading and writing was no exception. I think it is very important to remember as a teacher that your students will not necessarily view reading and writing in the same way you did. There will always be children in your classroom that will not enjoy reading and writing and struggle with it every day. This was one thing that was hard for me to understand and deal with when I first started in the teaching program. Because I had always been so motivated and excited about reading and writing I expected all students would be also. I quickly learned that there are many students that have no motivation to read or write and this can be very frustrating.

I remember really enjoying silent reading time in school or D.E.A.R. as we called it (Drop Everything and Read). I loved being able to chose my own books and be able to read what I wanted or found interesting. I never really liked reading the books that were assigned to us and that we were forced to read. However, in my ninth grade English class I had a very tough teacher and even though this class was a lot of work, I really liked it. We read the book To Kill A Mockingbird and I enjoyed this book a lot. It was one of the first times I was able to critically analyze a book and see the different perspectives found in one book as well as underlying factors that affect the way a book is written or interpreted by the reader. This teacher expected a lot from us and really pushed us to analyze different aspects of the book and I learned a lot from this teacher about different types of literature. She taught us how important literature is and the variety of literature that can be found.

Although I was not an extraordinary writer, I always enjoyed it for the most part. I remember in third and fourth grade we wrote stories that were then ‘published’ into hard cover books. We did all our own writing and illustrating and I loved feeling as if my own writing was being turned into a ‘real book’. This really encouraged us to think that our writing was important and it was a great way to get us to learn the writing process. We started by brainstorming and then wrote a few drafts that we were edited and turned into a final draft.

My attitude towards writing changed over time and I came to dislike writing more as I got into higher grades. By the end of high school I really did not enjoy writing and came to dread it. Throughout college, I have had to do a ton of writing and there has been only one class in which I have thoroughly enjoyed it. This was a creative writing course called “Invention in Writing”. I was very apprehensive when first starting this class because it was so open ended, however I came to really love it. It reminded me of the times in elementary school when I loved writing and was excited about it. I felt I finally had the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, in whatever form I wanted, with very little restrictions. This class really reminded me of how much fun writing can be and that all writing does not need to be structured in the way it is in most classes, through formal essays. I felt I was able to write in a creative way and present my thoughts in a way that made sense to me. I also went back to writing things by hand instead of electronically. This helped me to remember what it felt like to write the way I did when I was younger and really put me in a different frame of mind compared to the writing I have done on my laptop throughout college. I think it is important to reflect upon how our views of reading and writing have developed and evolved over time in order to better understand what our students will go through as they progress through school and to understand how we should teach.