Hello World…Nice to meet you… :-)

To start off, my name is Johnny, and I am in this course as part of my degree plan.  The thing is that the title of this course is what drew me into enrolling, as there are a number of other selections I could have chosen. In my own thoughts, I envisioned myself in this class sweating and frustrated, however leaving it with new ideas, skills, and educational methods that I will be using for the rest of my life…Thus, here I am…

A little background information about myself is that I grew up about an hours drive from town in Linda, Ca, and have been in and out of school since I was 18 years old. Luckily, I was able to finish my undergrad and am now a second semester graduate student; part of the TIL (Teaching International Languages) program, and am excited as well as a bit nervous about the semester.  Hopefully as the semester progresses, my nerves will calm and excitement will turn itself into determination, until then; It is a pleasure to meet you all.

 

Passages:

This is more of a term than a passage, although defined I still wonder if my understanding is correct or is in need of being corrected…

The term, “literacy event” is defined as “being and occasion when a person attempts to comprehend or produce graphic signs (Barton, 2007, p. 36)”.  To my understanding in the daily life of (I will assume) everyone in the class, we conduct such events when we text a person from our cellular devices.  Although the “graphic signs” or words/language within the text messages may not be that of standard english, I believe it to be a literacy event.  This belief stems from the notion that the sender selects a set of specific “sign” to convey a message and the receiver replies with a correlating set to notify the sender that either the sender’s message was understood, or seen.  And as Barton stated that there is overlay in the events and practices of literacy; I believe that the set of actions I described is an example of such a literacy event that has become a common literacy practice.

I selected this term for the first few pages of the reading “Literacy; An Introduction to the Ecology of the Written Language” for the reason that I believe that for me to gain a better grasp of the rest of the readings, I must clarify this term in more of a way that I can relate to my everyday life or daily practices.

 

From John F. Szwed’s “The Ehonography of Literacy”,  I found the following short passage to be amusing but true.

“Most of us, when writing notes for ourselves, assume special conventions of spelling and even syntax and vocabulary that we would not use if we were writing for others (Szwed, p.426)”.

 

As I read this, I peered over and looked at the scribbles, lines, highlights and short handed notes I had been taking and thought, “this is very true, I am not sure anyone else would be able to decipher these notes”.  However, the most interesting thing was that Szwed said that we would “most likely be able to  interpret another’s notes with our own procedures (Szwed, p.426)”.  However, I feel that to do this with my notes someone would need to understand the way I think, otherwise the confusion on the the pieces of paper I scribble on would only cause more of a headache than give clarity to a solution.  Likewise, I feel that because I think differently due to the experiences I have had, it would not be very beneficial for me to use someone else’s notes due to the fact that even though the words written can be read, the ideas and meaning behind the words or short handed sentences would be defined differently by my understanding if compared to the original composer.

Overall I found the readings to be refreshing and were not a dry as I had initially thought they were to be.  I look forward to the discussion in class upon these readings.