Literacy Narrative
Starting from a very early age, I can remember my mother reading to me on occasions. It was always about a faraway place like Africa or Asian with a few pit stops in Europe, or it was about different people who lived like Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and Hitler. My mom always made sure I knew about the world around me. Once I was in school I didn’t like to read at all, it was boring to me, so I didn’t actually read a book till the third grade.
Now I know what you’re saying “how could you not have read till the third grade?” I made sure my vocabulary was well rounded so when I would do assignments I shared just enough about the subject to pass but without actually divulging that I didn’t read the source material at all. That pretty much helped until the third grade came around and we had to read books and take in depth test about them online. But after I started reading books like; The Magic Tree House or The Adventures of Captain Underpants that’s when I really got into it. Throughout middle school I really got into biographies and horror books my room was filled with books by H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, I would even sit my mother down at nights and tell her everything I learned about people like Jim Jones, John Wayne Gacy, and Teddy Roosevelt.
When High School hit I would read everything from the Satanic Bible to a Bird’s Eye view of Kenya. My favorites mostly consisted of Helter Skelter, Mein Kampf, A History of The United States By the American People. During the latter years of my High School career I really dove into the history genre I always had a fascination with the subject but it wasn’t until almost my senior year when I really started reading about the things they didn’t teach us in history and government class. Reading really played an important role in my education and made me appreciate the languages around the world and the word selection people would choose to convey a certain message. With it being such an important part of my education I made the decision to go to college the first in my family to do so, I want to pursue a degree in education with a minor in history so I can teach kids about the importance of reading through history.
Through-out the semester we have used an erray of critical reading strategies to help disect certian sections and passages. The most common being preview discussion, this occurs when we are first given an assignment to read or write about where we will talk about what is going on in the passage to better understand what is needed to be done. To help with this the use of understanding context clues is very important and usually goes hand and hand with the practice of preview discussion. Another strategy we use is the Cornell note taking method, this style of note taking is, you have a piece of paper you put a line down the middle the left side of the paper you write a bunch of questions you have about the article and on the right side is the answers to the questions usually they are paraphrased or summerized in the person's own words.
At the start semester I was instructed to write this essay to show my literacy and English skills thus far. After this class I have come to the conclusion that this course has helped me tremendously with the comprehension of commas and sentence structure through the use multiple websites which incubuses the MLA format, repetition of workshops and projects to show the correct way to use techniques, and even having myself physically correct the same mistakes I seem to make time and time again. I have learned that critical thinking is an important skill that can always be improved upon. This skill is also a necessity for a multiple of professions and critical thinking coupled with proper grammar really makes an individual stand out.