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Fidel Dorantes
Dr. Meaghan Rand
UWRT 1103 - 39
24 September 2014
Learning to be literate in Literacy
Literacy, in its more formal definition, is knowing how to read and write. That in and of itself is
an illiterate definition of literacy.Literacy is the act and state of understanding the way something works
then taking the knowledge to create new thoughts and ideas. When we say that literacy is knowing how
to read and write, what should be said instead is that literacy is understanding how to read both on the
surface of a work, and the implied messages that hide in the writings underneath it. When we say that
literacy is knowing how to write, it isnt just knowing the proper grammar, syntax, and phrasing
patterns, its understanding how to write in a way that can create ideas that can be shared clearly no
matter the message or the form it came in. The journey to understand literacy is a long one, and often a
confusing one at that, but for all of us it begins with one simple act, learning to read.
When were born we dont know how to ride a bicycle. First we start off riding with training
wheels in order to get the feeling of how to ride with balance. Then after time those training wheels begin
to stifle us and we get rid of them to ride freely, and after time we even learn to do amazing tricks while
riding. In the same way youre not born knowing how to ride a bike you dont know what literacy really
is. Learning to read and write are the training wheels of literacy. The actual act of learning to read and
write is a little different for everyone, and like riding a bike can seem intimidating at first, but in essence
they all prepare us for the same thing, understanding literacy. For me, the first thing that sparked my
understanding of literacy was reading my name.

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We all know our names, we are called by it everyday of our entire lives as is one of the first
things we learn. I knew my name when people called it, I could recognize the sound, but would have
been oblivious to if it was written down. One day my mother, miraculously, managed to grab my
attention long enough to sit me down and show me my name written on paper. At the time I was
probably around three or four and it would soon be time for me to go to school for the first time. My
mother had worried that I would be mocked if I couldnt even read my name before going to school.
Slowly, carefully, my mother wrote each individual letter down, pronouncing my name as she went. At
last she said that this new drawing was my name. I couldn't understand it. How were those squiggles my
name? My name was a sound, not a drawing. My obviously bothered fidgeting must have tipped my
mother off that I hadnt yet understood. My mother explained to me that each of those odd lines had a
sound that went with it and that these sounds together made my name. I looked at the pattern again still
confused and my mother insisted that I repeat the sounds of each letter together with her. She would
sound the letter first and wait for me to repeat it. I sounded out the letters with my mother over and over
again until I realized I was saying it myself, reading it by myself. Elated by this new game I did it again,
with her name. Once again she slowly wrote her name, and I sounded out the letters with her until I
could read them by myself, even letting me write it out myself. It was at this point that my entire family
had joined into this new game. I had learned to read.
Reading gave me a new place for me to stretch the wings of my infamous curiosity. When I
started school I actively sought for the opportunity to use my new skill of reading whenever I could
which eventually led to learning about books. I became bored, even apathetic at times, to what was
happening around me if it didnt involve books. To me, a book represented a portal to different worlds
that revealed their secrets and wonders only to me who saw them in my mind like movies and

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sensations. More importantly, I read because I hated the boredom of the real world. I wasnt interested
in things like sports or club activities so I had very little with which to connect with the other kids of my
age. I hadnt cared, as long as I wasnt bored it didnt matter.
There was hardly a time throughout my child when I didnt have something to read. Most
people who recognized me knew me more because of the fact that I always had a book rather than
because they actually knew who I was. I think I knew each of my school libraries almost as well as I did
my own room. I started reading more complicated works as time went on which only deepened the
complexity of my love of reading. My infatuation with reading seeped into everything I did. Little things
like turning on subtitles on movies to read, reading during trips or on the bus home, even reading in the
bath, which isn't as tricky as it sounds if you're very careful. Exploring the labyrinth of a story just
became something I loved to do, whenever I could. I had started seeing it as a challenge, like a quest
for a young knight of literature. But this wonderful journey of mine couldnt last forever. As I grew older
more and more restrictions on my time and actions grew. It became a war of attrition as I fought to
keep my love of reading alive. This invasion of the real world into my paradise came to a head when I
entered into middle school.
It was in middle school where I learned why anyone could learn to hate literacy. It was the
suffocating formality of it all, it was the stagnation of original thought, and it was the death of creativity
that all came to be hatred. My hatred of the formal form of literacy did not happen all at once. It began
with smaller things that by themselves posed no real reason to create this animosity but by having them
constantly become obstacles for me to think in my own way I came to despise it. It was in middle
school where I learned that our educational system could turn even the most amazing thing and turn it
into a dull and arduous task. What I came to hate wasnt literacy, but horribly shallow form of literacy

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that the educational systems taught for grades.What I was being taught, what you were taught, was not
what literacy should be. What I was taught of literacy was a mentality of a correct interpretation and a
wrong interpretation.
No one likes being told that what they think is wrong, especially when it is our own opinions that
are being called out on, but that was exactly what school literacy was trying to do. The way literacy has
been taught until now is that there is always a more right way to understand a work and that your
opinion does not truly matter if is not the same as the one in the textbooks or if its not the same as the
answer keys. Who, then, decided that my own understanding is not as credible, not as right, as one in a
textbook? I missed the feeling of discovery that came when left to explore a story by myself. I missed
creating my own ideas of what the story was really saying to me, of being able to take any story and not
have to worry that someone would deem my ideas wrong. What used to be an exciting adventure
through pages of stories became an agonizing torture of analysis, explanation, and interpretation. It was
in middle school where I was taught that reading couldnt be fun anymore. In school I learned what it
meant to fear being wrong and hated what it was doing to my idea of what reading was. Reading had to
have a purpose and a recordable response that the school could use for a test. But I loved reading too
much to let the fear of being wrong stop me and I was angry at the schools for trying to make me hate
reading, so I rebelled in the only way I could. I read even more. I read during class, during lunch, during
breaks and recess. I read until they realized they had to get used to it. There were a few times when one
of my teachers thought to put me on the spot for disrupting class but they were never able to find real
cause through my reading quietly. And even though I used reading as a way to rebel against what I was
being taught some of what my teachers had shown me had stuck.

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I started looking at my books in a different way then I had before. When it started even I had
no real idea. When I read, I couldnt help myself from using the techniques taught to me to understand
the story better. It happened accidentally, then I used those techniques on every writing I read and
made. I started realizing that what had seemed like coincidence was part of the author's plan for me,
that there was a method behind this madness that made sense to me because of the formal literacy the
school had taught me. It was a shocking revelation to me that what I was fighting for so long ended up
enhancing my passion more than I knew it could. I was intoxicated by this new knowledge of literacy
but had yet to realize what I could do with it.
I said before that literacy was more than just reading, and what the school system was trying to
do is to help me learn the next steps to become literate in literacy, but along the way school took a
wrong turn in how it should have approached it. What school had begun to teach me was knowing that
reading was about understanding a work, but what school failed to include was an opportunity for
taking our unique understanding and creating our own views about the message as we understood it. It
wasnt until I started treating learning literacy as a hobby that I started to understand why school had
tried to teach understanding first.
People are hesitant when they hear they are learning about literacy because they revert back to
what they already think they know about formal literacy, but what they dont know is that they already
know literacy better than what they think. Our greatest challenge when learning literacy is not that we
cant learn to understand, but that we are afraid to create and to have our creations scoffed in front of
us. Being afraid is something natural and nothing to be ashamed of. There is not one person alive who
has never been afraid, and this applies to literacy too. If I could only share one piece of advice about
how to learn literacy it would be to not be afraid to learn, to understand, to think, and to create. Make

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mistakes along the way, dont shy away from expressing your ideas in whatever way you think is best
just because it doesnt fit the traditional mold of literacy. If you have understood something, if you think
that the way you can express this understanding is too different than what's been done before, go ahead
and do it anyway. No matter the end result you have put in the effort to become literate, and that counts
for more than you could realize because by putting in the effort you have taken the first steps to
understand yourself, and someday be able to express yourself in ways that I your humble writer couldnt
possibly think of.
Literacy isnt just about reading and understanding texts or pieces of writing, it was taking what
you read and what you understood about it and transforming the knowledge into a message made solely
by you. The message could be anything and everything. The in depth analysis technique that was
branded into my brain for years could now work for me instead of against me. By opening myself to
those patterns that underlied the work I could appreciate what I read on a higher level than before. I
could still love reading recreationally but I knew now how I could enjoy it intellectually as well. But even
now it still remains a struggle every now and again to find those patterns in the stories, or the message in
the works. Literacy, and learning to be literate is an ongoing learning experience because with every
mind born on this planet there are new ideas. Those ideas bounce off of other ideas and create even
greater ideas. As long as these great ideas continue to exist there will be someone to write them down.
Then its up to us to decide what they mean to us. Because when it all comes down to it, literacy is a
tool, just like any other, to help us grow as people, as thinkers, and hopefully as dreamers.

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Reflection
As a writer, and as a student, I have to say that I was very successful in making a story about
my experience with literacy in a way that I think isnt too demanding on the reader to understand and
that could be very enjoyable. I also think that a more successful part of my paper is that I clearly
express what my view on literacy is meant to be and wrote it in a way that leaves it to be interpreted by
the reader.
There are a few things that I actually am proud of in this paper but the main ones are that I was
able to turn an ordinary event like learning to read for the first time and connect it to my notion of
literacy, and that I was able to experience writing for a new audience whose reactions will be unknown
to me. The reason these make me proud is because I personally dont see many of my experiences in
life as noteworthy and so dont usually consider that I could use them as a way to express my ideas in a
way that others could understand them. The other reason is because this paper gave me the chance to
experiment with how I could communicate with an audience and get my point across about it to them
even though I dont know who will end up being the audience, which is refreshing as an author to
experience.
If I had more time, ignoring the fact that I had weeks to do this project, I would have like to
focus just a little more on connecting creativity to writing and that to reading. I do make mention of how
you can use writing as a way of creation through understanding but it wasnt until the conference that I
considered making that an integral part of the paper. More so now that I know I could have used the
idea of people being afraid to create new ideas because it isnt what they know. I wish I could have
used it as a part of explaining that understanding is trial and error and that mistakes in writing reflect how
willing you are to understand and to not be afraid to make mistakes.

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What I want readers to notice specifically from my paper is the idea that literacy is not by any
means bound by what a textbook says. I want my readers to understand that literacy is defined by them,
and by understanding how literacy functions they can learn to not be afraid of understanding more about
literacy as a whole, then taking their understanding to create new ideas because the worse thing that
could ever happen is if everyone thought the same there would be no need for literacy. It is up to the
reader to decide what literacy means to them and to create new impressions through their
understanding.