Hi everyone, my name is Madison de Ronde. This is my second year attending Chico State. I got involved with the water polo club on campus and I love it. I am a Liberal Studies major and want to be a teacher. I always wanted to be a first grade teacher because I love art and I figured lower elementary students do a lot of art. However, after attending some liberal studies class dealing with upper elementary level material I have changed my mind. I would love to teach fourth, fifth, or even middle school. In school I always hated math but have come to love it as I have grown and gotten better at it. I really want to learn how to teach kids who learn in different ways or have trouble learning in general. My plan is to get my Masters in Education and get a job closer to my family in Southern California.

To be a reader means that you both actively read and love to read. It means that when you read, you are absorbed by the material and become part of the story. If someone just skims a book they are not true readers; they are reading out of necessity and not passion. When I was younger my parents would read to me every night before I went to bed. After a while they got tired of my picking out the same books so they got me a cassette player and books on tape. Every night I would listen to those books and in doing so improved my vocabulary and my interest in stories. When I got old enough to read chapter books I would read a lot of novels starting with the classics that my mother loved, like Pride and Prejudice, and adventuring into realistic fiction that my day loves, like Dan Brown books. I almost read Angels and Demons in one sitting I was so invested in the story. In high school we were required to read many things that not all students loved but I actually loved all the books I had to read in high school. I would always try to uncover the meaning behind the authors words as well as why they chose those particular words just out of curiosity, so when we had to do that in school it came very naturally for me.

I really enjoyed the article and found it really interesting. I read the article again a couple days later in my other English class and we went into a discussion about it. What I got out of the article was that literacy is not fixed but fluid. It evolves with new technology and ways of communicating with one another. In order to obtain ones literacy level it is important to assess all of the things in someone’s life, which is nearly impossible. I think that people should be less focused on labeling someone’s level of literacy and more on the general impact of someone’s education and if it is effective in preparing students for the world outside schools.