NH literacy journeys

Welcome to our new members of the Learning Through Teaching class… and welcome back to the many of you returning for the course. I am looking forward to a new group. We have 16 teachers registered so far. Our text Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice is on order. 

For our first post, I thought we might return to a prompt that started our work off last year. As a way to introduce ourselves and connect, think back to your best memories of reading or writing and share a few.

I’ll start.

I remember the elementary school book orders filled with paperbacks for less than a dollar. It was something to bring home a stack of Encyclopedia Brown, Runaway Ralph, The Chronicles of Narnia, or Laura Ingalls Wilder books and spend the afternoon surrounded by good stories. Favorite trips out with my mom were to the library down the hill from our house. They would let me check out eight books each time I visited and that was the hardest part: which eight to choose? I remember reading through entire shelves in that library and our trips to the bakery for pie after. Mom was a reader and still is. My father and I often talked about what he was reading, and thankfully my children and husband are all big readers and share their favorites with me. I have a hard time imagining a life without books.

As for writing, well, I used to keep a steno notebook with the wire spiral edge in my sock drawer. It held stories I was writing and lesson plans I used with my neighborhood friends. I planned to be an author or a teacher. I always wrote fiction. I wrote just for the joy of creation. Once I hit college my favorite course was a poetry class where we had to bring a poem to a writing workshop every week. I had never written poetry and was terrified, but it was so much fun to read and listen to others read that I felt more alive just being there. When I started teaching third grade in southern California, I had 34 little ones and felt completely over my head all year, but we wrote stories and I always wrote a page for each class book we created. That was the most fun I had that year. So.. writing, reading, thinking, sharing… it’s always been a part of my life. I worry for the teenagers I meet who’ve never found joy in either.

Penny

Hello colleagues,As part of our adventure this semester, I thought we should enter the world of blogging. I know many of you have blogs or contribute to blogs, but one devoted to our work in literacy at the high school will be something new for all of us. A blog has several advantages. I like that I can log in while watching Jon Stewart reruns after dinner and our usual hike with the dogs. I like that I can read at my own pace, without watching the clock to see where I have to be next. And I like that threads of conversation begin in a blog that we often don’t have time for in the daily rush of high school life. I hope that this blog will not be a burden, but an opportunity to extend the conversations we begin in our class.I hope you will write a response to this post about your own literacy journey. Consider experiences that formed you as a reader and writer. I’ll give you mine.I was always a reader. I distinctly remember the night I learned to make sense of letters on the page. I was holding Dr. Seuss and sitting in our living room with a swirl of adults around me babbling and eating and just being adults: uninterested in children (at least in my experience.) I kept sounding out individual letters and blending them and all of a sudden making words and sentences. I was exhilerated: I knew reading was big news, big opportunity. I still feel that way. The last time I kept track I read 90 books in one year. Which means of course that I don’t do lots of other things: I don’t cook much, my yard is full of weeds…you get the idea.As for writing, well I used to hide a book of stories in my sock drawer as a child. As much as I loved those books I read, I really just wanted to be one of them: I wanted to be an author. For years I was convinced it would never happen, but then it did. I write a lot now. I write to figure out what I have to say about all kinds of things. I love writing and hate it with equal passion. My writing will never match what I believe it should be, but I get a lot out of engaging in the process and learning as I go. So now it’s your turn….Penny