Trevor Neer Blog # 1

A)        Hello all! My name is Trevor Neer and I am in my third semester here at Chico State.  I am liberal studies major and transfer student from a community college in Southern California.  I graduated from West High school in Torrance, CA in 2010.  Out of high school I applied and got into Chico State but decided I wanted to try and follow my dream of playing college baseball.  El Camino, the local community college, had a great transfer rate and their baseball program was well respected throughout the state so I took my talents in that direction.

My first two years I played baseball and took the minimal amount of units.  At the time I was undeclared towards a major so my classes were the general education classes that all athletes were placed in.  Getting by barely describes my first two years at El Camino.  Not only were the classes easy but also I was not even putting any effort forth.  My first two years of college were a waste of time and it was time for a change.  Grades held me back from being able to transfer and continue to play baseball so that dream I decided to put to rest my dream of playing baseball at a division one level.  It was time to move onto the next faze of my life and decide which career and degree I would choose.

For years I had worked a local summer camp.  It was an instructional baseball camp that went from 8am-4pm Monday-Friday and children from ages 5-12 could attend.  I had worked this camp since I was 16 years old and always really enjoyed being out there all summer with the kids.  The summer after my last season playing baseball I realized at camp that baseball was too dear to my heart to let go.  Not only did I realize how important baseball still was for me, I also realized how good I was a working with kids and sharing my knowledge of the game with them.  So after this summer I changed my course of action and began to tackle class towards a degree in liberal studies with a single subject accreditation to teach mathematics in higher levels.  Ideally I would like to teach high school math and coach baseball, but I could see myself ending up at a middle school early on while I work towards getting a masters as well.

 

B)        To me being “a reader” is someone who daily takes part in reading and absorbing some kind of material.  Reading is stimulating and can increase literacy through many different forms.  This is why I firmly believe that in order to be a reader you do not have to be the person who constantly has their head buried in a novel.  Students and professionals are required daily to read material for their jobs alone.  Myself personally I would not enjoy reading a novel after a long day of work, or in my case school.  I find more interest in online sports articles, and buzz feed stories, on top of all the other social media stories that are daily posted.  So reading for me is comes in different contexts, but is still just as present as any other “reader.”

What I thought was very interesting was how Williams connected literacy to class and cultural capital.  I never had thought about how they were closely associated.  At first I did not really know what cultural capital was so I had to separately look up what it meant and a quick Google search led me to sociology.about.com where I found cultural capital defined as “the ideas and knowledge that people draw upon as they participate in social life. Everything from rules of etiquette to being able to speak and write effectively can be considered cultural capital.”  So what I took Williams to be saying was that literacy could be thought of in a business sense, the more reading and writing you processed would be like expanding your business.  Another point I liked was the connection to literacy as power and how it can be seen in the large middle class.  One is in the grey area between the lower and middle class will often be associated the class that best matches his literacy.  If he or she is not as literate “ a person could fall from the middle class if he or she loose the ability to use language in a conventional way” (Williams).  With the middle class being so large in our country it is important that we keep pushing literacy and the emphasis on the power it poses.  So many kids want to grow up to be rich and famous, yet do not realize that it all starts with how well you are able to read, write, and speak.