We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. 
<— It's my kitty.
Hi! My name is Ashley. I am 21 years old and a junior transfer from San Jose, California. I am an English major and I want to become a foreign English teacher. From this class, I am hoping to take away ways to teach composition and tips n tricks to help my students learn English. I want to find different ways to help them. I am really excited about the internship since that will help me greatly. In my literate life, I do not read or write for pleasure anymore. It is mainly for school. My reading material is textbooks or assigned reading for my classes and writing is usually notes or even memos to myself about what I am reading. The biggest insight for me was seeing how all of my writing is school based. It is usually short hand and not very interest based. Szwed’s text definitely made me realize that not only do I use my writing and reading for school but that is pretty much all I do. He mentions different way in which writing and reading can be used outside the school setting for example in a social setting or just normal day to day life. Reading all the different ways reading and writing can be used and seeing how i only really use it in one way most of the time was a bit sanding for me. I do also use reading for texts but that is such a small amount of my time that I don’t think it carries as much weight as my school time reading.
2 Replies to “<— It's my kitty.”
Hey Ashley, thanks for the cat photo. Cat have a name? This year we found two, hours old kittens and bottle fed them to life. They are strange cats since they’ve only known people as the parents: BarlyPop and Lemonade. Totally entertaining daily.
One thing that strikes me about the description of your literacies is the disconnect between school and interests: “The biggest insight for me was seeing how all of my writing is school based. It is usually short hand and not very interest based.” Could be interesting to follow up on this: how does it change your reading and writing practices if the reading and writing you’re doing is not driven by interests (and is that a sign to change majors or is it due to GE courses)? What does it mean to have most of your literate life dictated by others (i.e.: professors)?
There is a elementary school teacher–Donalyn Miller–whose research on reading I follow. She has a book called _Reading in the Wild_ where she argues that we must look for places in our life for “fringe reading”: waiting for an appointment, while waiting for a friend, in between classes. She argues that we often think we need hours for reading, but that the 5 or 10 stolen minutes while we are waiting for others can remind us that we like to read and we have some control over what we read. I carry a young adult novel with me everywhere. Always so glad to have it when I find myself stuck somewhere. https://bookwhisperer.com/
Thanks for the post and the cat.
Kim
Ashley, you’re kitty is adorable : ).
And I get what you mean about school reading and writing being the vast majority of our literacy. It tends to prioritize itself in our lives a lot of the time. While not completely a bad thing, it can be hard to find interest in school literacies if they don’t engage us but rather only focus on the schooling aspect and that can get pretty boring. So I can understand what you mean when there is this disconnect between what we mainly read and write from school versus what we read and write for our own sake and how we can lose interest in doing those kinds of literacies outside of a school setting. It’s definitely something that I felt before too, particularly when it comes to writing for my own interest outside of academia and kind of forcing myself to find incentives to engage myself in different kinds of writing.
Anyway, good job on this post. It’s always interesting to read everyone’s different experiences with literacy.
(=^･ω･^)b