Literacy Autobiography

  I've always been surrounded by books.  My childhood, my adolescence, my adulthood- all have been  encapsulated by an influential book, titles that still remain on my shelf today. I like to think that my relationship with books is symbiotic, one did not start the other, we just co-exist, feeding each other with our passion for the other.  Books need readers and I need books.

 It started with my grandmother.  For each and every occasion, from birthdays to graduations, she would give me a book.  They did not vary much in author, but I loved them all the same.  Then friends and relatives gave me books.  My mother, in what I'm sure was a bid for free babysitting, would drop me off at the local library (a half an hour away from the house) while she would run errands and attend ballet class. I would sit happily listening to books on records or wander the stacks for hours, discovering new books, picking out old favorites. Each time, I would come home with stacks of books that she would read to me at bedtime, both of us laughing over the genius of Shel Silverstein or wishing we had a chocolate bar as Charlie started on his adventure through the factory.

My love of all things book (and the peace and quiet of the library) led me to create my own  library at home.  At the age of ten, I carefully sorted and labeled my books into sections like favorites, historical fiction, and non-fiction, taping pieces of different colored construction paper onto the spines of the books and filling out index cards with the appropriate bibliographic information.  Those cards were then carefully placed into an old metal business card box appropriated for the alphabetical partitions in the back.

I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who noticed my love for reading.  My upper elementary school teacher, whose cataloguing system inspired my own, gave me stacks of books each week, hand selected just for me (in one of those stacks was the book that defined my childhood) and encouraged me to keep reading. But after I graduated from this school, my teachers never inspired me to read until I discovered AP English. They also killed the love that I had for writing.  Being graded on the quality of my poetry did not bode well for me.  It was the best that I could do.  I followed the assignment and loved the poem that I wrote, but the grade I received did not reflect my effort nor my enjoyment for writing. I stopped writing for pleasure except for my angst ridden adolescent journals full of angry girl poetry intertwined with lyrics from favorite songs and diatribes about my parents.

  However, my own quest for the perfect book did not end.  I used my babysitting money to buy books from the school book orders.  I read books in college just for fun, books on top of the ones that I was assigned in class.  While in college, I discovered that teaching, like reading, was something that I was good at and something that I enjoyed doing.   They both invigorated me.

So, through a series of events and various false starts, I became a teacher. I wanted to inspire people to read.  I wanted to show people that books came in all forms: stories, plays, video game manuals, murals, songs.  I did not understand when my students said they could not stand reading or thought it was boring.  I just assumed, and still feel this way today, that they had not found the right match quite yet.

And that's what I want to do.  It's what I do not.  I am a book hunter, a book scavenger, a book engulfer. I love the challenge of finding the right book for the reluctant reader.  I love having my students recommend books to each other.  I love talking about books with my students.  In my classroom, I have created a community of readers inspired by myself, my teachers over the years, and by Reggie Routeman.

But in all of the reading that I explored and the community that I formed in my classroom, I realized that I needed to strengther my writing and I needed to learn how to find the right words to express myself, just like my students needed to do.  We began the journey together, and I found that I needed to continue to research and explore myself as a writer, but I didn't know where to start.  I needed a push, a shove, and a lot of guidance.

I am ready to be a student again and I am encouraged (and a little petrified) to be in a classroom again, this time sitting on the opposite side of the desk and I am so worried about being judged not good enough. I always tell my students that if they think they are not good enough, its just because they have not given it enough time or effort or practice. We are a non-graded school so these conversations always occur during a writing conference and is their own feelings and hang-ups about the creative process. And now,  I try to tell myself the same thing as I sit here thinking I'm no researcher and what on earth are my literacies.