Bird's Second Draft of 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 greet the librarian who would write my name down for a record player and pull out my library card, which she let me keep in her files by her desk. I would sit happily listening to books on records or wander the stacks for hours, discovering new books, picking out old favorites. The experience of being at the library, the enjoyment I received from my weekly visit stayed with me throughout my life. My mother would pick me up a few hours later and 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 to munch on 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 organised the books alphabetically in their categories, a habit I still try to maintain today both in my library at home and at school.

In my early years, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who noticed my love for reading.  My upper elementary school teacher, Steve, whose cataloguing system inspired my own, hand-selected stacks of books each week, just for me. In one of those stacks was the book that defined my childhood, A Wrinkle In Time. He encouraged me to keep reading. We also wrote a great deal.  We had weekly assignments that were to write about anything that struck our fancy. Writing assignments for history could be letters from one historical figure to another. They could be writing about a place you wanted to visit, an excellent disguise for researching a specific place.   I enjoyed these writing assignments, especially the ones that were “alternative” assessment (most of our assessment was what today would be classified as alternative).  I still remember the excitement I had in researching Thomas Jefferson and his life then drafting a letter from the perspective of one of his daughter’s to him as a way to reflect on our American Revolution unit.

Steve also introduced me to my two greatest passions (outside of reading): Shakespeare and acting. Steve read the play aloud to us and then we performed them for our school production. I was a nine-year-old Ophelia, a ten-year-old Hermia, and a life-long fan of anything Shakespeare.  Upon hearing about my performance of Ophelia, a great-aunt gave me a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s retelling of Shakespeare paired with black and white photos of who’s who in Shakespearean acting in the 1950s and 60s.  I knew Judi Dench, John Neville, a very young Ian McKellen, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Vivian Leigh, Richard Burton before I knew of any modern actors my fellow students could discuss at length.  I was fasticnated by the elaborate costumes, the dramatic poses, the overdrawn plots, and more from this book of Shakespeare’s stories.  I spent the rest of my teenage years life trying to find local performances to attend and now teach him to my students with the passion- William Shakespeare was the best soap opera writer ever. He was the first recycler (the same names re-occur through his plays), borrower (many plots are just reformulated), and crafter of the English language as we know it today.  I like to think that my students now have a respect for the man who invented pronouns.  It helps that he invented the work puke.

But after I graduated from West Branch School, I experienced a slow and painful death of my love of reading and writing.  I wanted to love my new school, for I had always loved going to school.  I brought my report card in my pocket on the first day of school just to prove that I was smart.  Intelligence, in whatever form you possessed, was celebrated at my old school. But what I found instead was a sterile environment that slowly drained out my curiousity, my independence, and my self-assurance. There was no acting program or school plays in my public school. While at the time, I could not put a label onto the feeling, I know now that the lack of trust from my teachers suffocated me.  I was a student interesting in learning and I was capable of guiding the process myself with their help. But no one listened. To my young self, it seemed as if no one paid attention to the different literacy events we had before we walked into the classroom and I never felt that I was part of a discourse community.  We were not talking about a text, we were instructed what to think  about a text.I managed fine in seventh grade, but by eighth grade I put up my last fight. And it happened in English class. My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Rohe, routinely beat out everything that I loved about the English language. She repesented everything that I hated about public school.  I dreaded every day that I walked into her class and she knew it. I felt that I was her target.  Looking back today, I know there must have been other mitigating factors, but at the time, I felt that I had to defend every choice I made. She made me feel like dirt. My dyslexica was undiagnosed and I had a bunch of coping mechanism that had never uindergone such scrutiny.  She was convinced that I needed to comform just as much as I was convinced that I needed to stay true to myself. It was a very bad combination. I so wanted to prove to her that she was wrong.  Just because I did not know how to diagram a sentence did not mean I could not name all of the grammatical parts.  I could label them, but did not understand the construction of the diagram.  She was shocked when I proved to be “good” at something, and reluctantly called on me for oral reading assignments for Romeo and Juliet. All of my “mistakes”, she blamed my hippy school, which made it even worse for I knew that that was where I was enriched and nurtured. Before the end of the year, she finally broke me. I conformed as much as I could, with my undiagnosed disability. She became the epitome of what I wanted to never become and never experience again. Around this time, I found the second book in the Wrinkle In Time trilogy, which has a subplot of the main character, Meg, trying to survive in her stifling public school environment.  There was hope!  Other people must have had the same experiences.

While I only had her for a year, my teachers’ teaching methods, in the next four years, did not alter very much from her philosophy.  Luckly, they did not have the personal vindictivness that she did. I also had learned to be passive, not active in my learning experience. Reading and writing became personal, something that I did at home.  While I was always a model student,having figured out the equasion, I was never comfortable with how I was learning at school.

In ninth grade English, I recieved my first creative writing assignment.  We had to write a poem with a rhyme scheme that had at least eight stanzas.  I loved my poem, which was about going to the dentist. i had finally gotten my braces off and also had a hilarious story about biting my dentist when he tried to pull out one of my teeth. I labored over the poem, carefully crafting each word in each stanza. To this day, 24 years later,I still remember the first stanza:

Going to the dentist is not much fun

When I sit in the chair I want to run

Anytime, anywhere that drill can’t reach

Like the sunny ocean or the sandy beach

I admit.  It is awful, but it was the first time I had written a poem with parameters, and, at the time I was so proud of it.  It was autobiographical. We submitted them to be graded and that assignment created my life-long fasination with the question-how can creativity be graded?  Being graded on the quality of my poetry did not bode well for me.  That poem 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 gave up seeing myself as a writer.  My work had been judged inadequate. I kept my rough draft for myself but threw out the final draft which included all of the corrections I made for my teacher. I stopped writing creativley, except for my angst ridden adolescent journals full of angry girl poetry intertwined with lyrics from favorite songs and diatribes about my parents.

Then, in 12th grade, I was blessed with Mr. Farrelly as my AP English teacher. He opened my eyes in so many ways, especially to how literature is powerful and spreads messages. He was always up for an argument, if you had the facts to back it up. He constantly pushed us to think for ourselves. He taught Hamlet, To Kill A Mockingbird, Native Son, and The Invisible Man.  He slipped me copies of my favorites to keep for my personal library, marking for the school district that I had returned the books. The above mentioned books lit me on fire and made me see that there was good literature to be read and interesting topics to be discussed. I also loved these books because they were outside of my cultural experiences.  They opened windows to worlds and experiences that I had no previous knowledge about. They allowed me to experience, in some ways, different racial identities that, having grown up in a rural Catholic farming community in Pennsylvania, I had never fathomed. I knew two black people, one raised in a Catholic orphanage, the other my aunt who was born and raised in Ethopia.  Both of their experiences were very different from the characters in the books we read in class. Other than hearing the blantant racism exploding from my fellow students mouth, and having discussions with my aunt about her experiences transitioning to life in The United States,  I had never stopped to think about exploring my role in defining cultural, racial, and societal expectations. I already knew that I did not fit into the expectations of my school community, and these books gave me some hope. They also opened up a variety of questions that still remain unanswered today.

We also wrote research papers at the end of the semester.  I wanted to write mine on the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event that I had just learned about a few days before the assignment and was very interested in exploring. Mr. Farrelly said there would not be enough information on the topic.  Today, I wonder if he was trying to avoid some sort of political problem. However, he redirected me to another cultural hot spot: the massacre of the village of Me Lai during the Vietnam War. As I read what happened to those innocent villagers and to the soldier that were apart of the slaughter, I became insensed. How could this have happened? What can I do to make sure that it does not again.  This assignment guided me towards a life of activism and peaceful protest.  After having been beaten down by the system, he reinvigorated my want to “go against the man”.

We also read The Great Gabsy, Tess of the D’Umbervilles , Crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre and a few others that bored me to tears. I argued a bit about the victimhood of Tess, but stopped after a while.  I just didn’t like these books. Yes, I hated them all.  I recently decided it was time to re-read classics of literature and to see if time and my life experiences would make me appreciate them more.  I started with A Brave New World (not a required book from high school, but a classic all the same) and then re-read The Great Gabsy and with a reading guide by my side, explored all of the deeper meanings that I was unable to uncover by myself.  It was what made the book interesting and also was such an interesting view on the craft of writing.   

Mr. Farrely also was my savior. I turned in a paper that I had forgotten to spell check and he noticed the patterns in my errors. He signed my up for  diagnoses exams that discovered my dyslexia. It was the last month of my high school career.

 However, my own quest for the perfect book did not end.  I used my babysitting money to buy books from 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.

Books even factored into the purchase of my home.  Having seen multitues of homes, I was won over by a 1920s farmhouse that had been gutted in the 80’s and had a living room with one whole wall of shelves.  Finally, a place where I could lay out all of my books to view and select whatever was my pleasure.  Nine years later, these shelves are double stacked, with an additional shelf in my husband’s studio upstairs.

More and more, I am starting to realise that I just look at literacy as texts, but have forgotten to acknowledge the other aspects of literacy.  It has been interesting to journey back to my first draft and see the holes after reading more about literacy theory.  I began to examine race, socio-economic relationships, and other factors that have identified my literacy experience.  While my family did not have a lot of money growing up, my parents felt it was important for me to attend a private school a half an hour away from our home.  Without that experience, I would have never met Steve, who nutured and grew my love for literacy through books, games, and plays. It also fostered the type of teacher that I wanted to be.  My teachers at the school were facilitators, not instructors. We did not sit in desks lined up in rows. We were treated as individuals that had interesting things to say.

This is what killed my love for reading and writing when I was in public school.  It did not return until I went to college, and even then, the classes that I loved were all around large tables where the teacher sat and talked with us about an piece of text.  We were asked our opinions, we argued with each other, and we were allowed to take risks.  I gained a bit od displaced arrogance and frustration with the traditional row of desks and the teacher that lectured.  I felt that if they weren’t willing to put in the effort, why should I?  Thank goodness I went to a school where those classes were few and far between otherwise my GPA would not have reflected my capabilities. I had found a college, that for the most part, suited my literacy domains and practices.   

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.

My quest for the perfect book still has not ended.  Once the “perfect” is found, I realize that it was perfect for the moment (kind of like the adage- he doesn’t have to be the one, just the one right now).  The books that represent me are ones that fit who I was at the time.  While they all still strike a personal chord, it is not that they are great literature.  Henry VIII  will never be as good as Rich in Love, the bible for my parent’s divorce and still sits on my shelf today. As in my classroom, different books appeal to me at different times.  Which may explain why I can’t find a book right now that I love.

I realize now that I cannot separate my literacy from who I am, from childhood   It permeates from every aspect of my life from my trips to the library (where I catch up on the local happenings, get recommendations from people there, and help assist in the Teen literacy program) to eagerly anticipating Much Ado About Nothing in the movie theaters to my recent crave for a Superman tee-shirt because David Tennant wore one in both leading roles in Hamlet and in Much Ado, making me wonder if the S stands for Shakespeare and that is pretty cool in my book. I have an allotment of pins I wear to school about editing and about Shakespeare and handed out awards that were pins of Hogwarts houses, Hunger Games quotations, and Percy Jackson stuff before all of the “cooler” prizes were taken.  Without literacy, the pieces of who I am would slowly crumble until there was nothing left.

                  

politics- my father was so diffeent from me that I wanted to become aware of what other thoughts were out there.  I wanted to meet people that had my same point of view- discourse community

Revised Literacy Identity Autobiography Jen Liddy

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Reading happened early, easily and often, but it wasn’t a collaborative experience. I read alone and spent all my free time devouring books, systematically consuming any author’s entire collection: Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Francine Pascal. One summer afternoon, I stopped dead in the middle of a Nancy Drew mystery. I realized, with shock, there was a formula! These books revealed themselves to be the same story disguised in different characters and settings. Carolyn Keene had duped me. Furthermore, I was disappointed: I still had over 10 unread Nancy Drew books sitting on my corner shelf, awaiting attention, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish them. I was done with children’s books and went looking for more sophisticated reading.

Reading in my family’s house was not a sport for the cultivated or urbane. Trashy titles were thoughtlessly thrown about the coffee table, and no one stopped me when I picked up Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.  A tween, I was thrilled to be thrown into the abyss of adult literature; it was so corrupt, naughty, prurient. Whether my mother ever noticed I was reading this smut, I don’t know, but I began another round of wolfing down as many books as Sheldon would author and was immensely disappointed when I finished his list, so I moved onto Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark. Reading helped me escape from my mother and unhappy family life, a pastime she could not begrudge me. It was an escape that earned me nerd status among siblings and friends, but it also gained me approval from adults, and I felt desperately grown up.

I truly identified myself as a reader, easily excelling at reading in school and at home. However, there was never any overt discussion about the different types of reading that one is expected to do. The reading I was doing was purely escapist: I did not process it or analyze it. Comprehension and plot, characterization and conflict were ideas that I could easily discern, but frankly, if asked about themes or symbols or irony or the social importance of a text, I’d be flummoxed. Reading obviously got more difficult in high school, when offerings like The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick were on the menu. It was in high school that I began to struggle with reading, but I had no framework to understand why. Suddenly, reading was no longer fun, easy, or enjoyable, but I slogged through and managed to still be a good, effective reader, albeit a much more unhappy one. I can see now that this struggle was rooted in failure to thrive as a thinker vs. thriving merely as a reader.

This very struggle, as I see it today, led me to become a reluctant English major in college. There was nothing else I was really good at or had cultivated an interest in; I only knew I was a fast and good reader. So, I shrugged my shoulders and became an English major, barking the caveat that “I don’t want to be a teacher” and “I’m better at writing papers instead of taking tests” to anyone who would listen. But at college I found I had a knack for talking about literature with others and could easily bang out a paper in a few hours. Once a strong, independent worker, at college I discovered that I only thrived in an interactive, interpersonal environment. I’d struggle if forced to analyze in isolation, and I constantly questioned my literacy abilities.

Though still a successful student and a good reader, I felt less intelligent than my peers and fearfully avoided offerings like poetry and Shakespeare. I had friends and peers who could think deep thoughts, while I struggled in philosophy, political science, and sociology classes with any idea that wasn’t an experience I’d had personally. I loved the concrete and applicable-to-my-life classes. Abstract, visionary, or risky ideas seemed beyond my grasp and understanding. Rather than read more on a topic, seek out my professors’ help, or engage in challenging conversations with peers, I chose to feel inadequate, believing I was just not that abstract kind of thinker.

As an educator now, I can clearly see how a lack of guidance and facilitation stunted me. I didn’t have the vocabulary to know about learning styles, reading processes, or literacy. I wish I could go back and tell myself, “Jen, you are an interpersonal learner who processes best verbally.” Knowing and embracing that would have instilled a confidence that I would not have for fifteen years to come. But frankly, I wonder if my perception of myself during college was too harsh. I can’t imagine that any of my professors worried about me; I was a capable, able student who got good grades. Such self-doubt and an overly critical, skewed view of myself is a recurring theme in my discovery of identity and self.          

A shift in my literacy and identity happened after college: I had become a reading snob, believing that an English major should only engage with ‘real literature’.  And it was on a daily, monotonous commute from Long Island to Manhattan that I saw everyone reading a new author, John Grisham. I was disgusted and vowed I would not read that trash. But the commute was long and John Irving had just broken my heart with A Prayer for Owen Meany. I deigned to give this Grisham a try. I confess: I was hooked. And hence, my literacy identity throughout my mid-twenties was punctuated and defined by learning to ‘never say never’.  

At this point in my life, I began a more kind approach to finding my identity, and this ‘never say never’ philosophy allowed me to enjoy my reading, not judge it. I could mull over Hamill’s Snow in August and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but it was also okay to blow through each of Grisham’s newly-published books. It allowed me to enjoy a bus ride in silence with Groom’s Forrest Gump but to seek out a book club to process my thoughts on Ondaatje’s The English Patient or Schlink’s The Reader.  Talking and reading and discussing and arguing and thinking about books of all sorts allowed me to realize that I was no dummy for failing to comprehend understand Melville in high school or Plato in college. These complex thinkers created deep thematic schemas that were just impossible for an undeveloped mind to comprehend without facilitation.

I was able to forgive myself, if only a little bit. For throughout my mid-twenties, living in Manhattan and working for a large company, I was still fairly burdened by an overall lack of confidence. I knew I processed ideas differently than my colleagues and friends and was always very impressed with the global thinkers, the people who could see a big, visionary idea or put small ideas together to make a big idea. I felt very different from these people, very in awe of them, and at that point in my life, different meant less-than. This sense of identity held me back, and I pined to be more analytical. I was saddened that I wasn’t a ‘big thinker’, just a small reader and a ‘do-er’. I had no skills to effectively think about the “why” or “what if” of any situation, or none that I could discern. Give me a checklist, and I would accomplish everything on it efficiently. Give me a big mess to organize, and I would blow your mind. Ask me to edit a document, and I would become eagle-eyed. But these were not important tasks in my scheme of what was important in the universe. Anyone could do the stuff I was doing at my job; but I was dying to do something I could be passionate about, something that mattered and that I could do to make a difference in someone’s life. But as such a small thinker, where could I go and what difference could I make?

I was 26 when I began to dig, taking classes, talking to people, noticing what I cared about. Nutrition? Counseling? Nothing was sticking, but I kept doing what I always did best: reading and reading and reading.  Then I tried experiencing: I took the opportunity to see Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet at the 57^th Street Theater, sitting for five hours with much of it going over my head but fascinated by its beauty. I embraced the chance to see The Winter’s Tale in Central Park and was blown away by the risks the director took with setting and costumes. And on a cross-town bus ride, reading Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown”, I began to envision the terrible characters and see the symbolic imagery in my head.

I realized that plays are meant to be seen and literature is meant to come alive! How else can it have meaning? Why hadn’t anyone ever showed me this stuff before? The performance is integral to the understanding; it becomes a visceral experience. The visual aspect was so powerful! My prefrontal cortex had apparently finally fused, because suddenly I could connect ideas and see deeply into the novels that I’d been avoiding for years, finding meaning and extrapolating current-day applications. On this bus ride, I had the epiphany that there had to be better, more relevant ways to teach classic authors. I fantasized about how to help real kids connect with fancy books and deep ideas. Ultimately, reading on those cross-town bus rides, I began to listen to that inner voice, the one that said, “Maybe, perhaps, you should become an English teacher. Maybe you can make these books understandable, relatable, and palatable to high school kids. Wait! Why only teach the classics? Maybe you can even introduce them to the cool contemporary books that you love so much.” And I did the distasteful and unthinkable thing: I became an English teacher.

Obviously, I was late to come to understand that it takes all kinds of thinkers to make the world a rich place and to understand that there are different kinds of ‘literacy’ and ‘identity’. It was my shaky and brave undertaking of becoming a teacher at age 30, of delving into doing that thing I never wanted to do, that helped me realize I could teach myself to become a ‘big thinker’, moving beyond being ‘just a small reader and do-er’. I learned to read for different purposes and in different ways, and I began to appreciate this metamorphosis. I recognize now that I took literacy and identity for granted, exhibiting a kind of benign neglect of it for many years, which lead to frustration and self-doubt for far too long.

As a teacher, I live and preach the philosophy of accepting the various literacies and identities that make up each one of us. In my forties, self-doubt eases away each day, but it’s the constant engagement with new experiences and the reflection upon those experiences that allows me to be kinder to myself and to others. The big thinkers, the visionaries and the blindingly brilliant, are wonderfully generative and move us in new directions. The small thinkers, the do-ers, have a great place in our world, for no great idea is accomplished without them.  I see myself, my literacy and my identity, as someplace in the middle, constantly vacillating depending upon the context and the content.

I define my identity as flexible and kinetic: I know when I have to work harder and read more closely; I evaluate when I have to process differently; and I am able to teach others how to apply these useful skills to their own lives at a much earlier age than I was able to do so. With students, I am transparent in how I acquired this literacy identity, in reading, processing, and thinking. Students love to hear concrete stories of times I doubted myself, failures I’ve endured, and mistakes I’ve made that hindered my success. I express such vulnerabilities to model for them that our literacy is a) always changing and b) is in our control. They see me as a human standing in front of them, and my hope is that they understand that the confident woman standing up there teaching them was once as insecure and lost as they currently are.

My identity is now strongly rooted in inspiring each of us to examine our literacies, to define our identities, and to evaluate our preferences and strengths. Only then can we decide what tools work for us and practice applying these to reach the identity and goals we desire. We must remember to not accept the status quo, for it is a stagnant place that kills confidence and stunts identity.

Christine Literacy Bio

       I learned to read in Kindergarten, but I don’t remember much about it other than the word “the” which kept stumping me. After that initial hurdle learning to read and write came easily to me. Unfortunately, our school was not exactly academically rigorous and we did very little science. Writing wasn't practiced as much as it is in today's schools and I was very nervous about writing and felt disconnected to the words I wrote. The example that comes to mind is while in fifth grade we had an assignment to research and write a paragraph about someone from early American History. My writing about Betsy Ross must have been disjointed and a mess, because the teacher trying to help me fix it and I had no idea of what she was saying or how to make it better. 

When I was in first grade, my family joined the Catholic Church. My father had grown up Catholic, but Mom had to convert. We all got baptized and went to Sunday School. There the teacher was very nice to me. I loved to draw pictures of angels and hear about the different bible stories. There were two girls in class who didn't like me and would always call me the teacher's pet, which I didn't even know what it meant. They were much better dressed, mean girls at the age of 6. Our family life was anything but consistent and we didn't make it to class every Sunday. Once I went there after being absent for weeks and the students had workbooks. There were no extras and I felt like I was putting a big imposition on the teacher. I decided I didn't like her or Sunday School any more and I definately didn't like those two girls.
In second grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Smith, who either had a nervous breakdown, or suffered from an illness because half way through the year, she left and we had a long term substitute, Mrs. Foster. Mrs. Smith was not that old but she had been a smoker and looked haggard. One time a friend of mine wanted me to come over to her house after school. Her mother was a little upset that I had just showed up and wanted me to call my mother. I told her that my mother wouldn't care that I was not home, but Chris's mother insisted. Chris wanted me to stay for supper, but her mother clearly did not want me there. The next day when I got to school, I was sitting at a table on the next thing I knew my head was slammed down on the table and Mrs. Smith was telling me what a bad girl I was to go to Chris's house without an invitation and without telling my mother. I was shocked and humiliated and said nothing about this for years. I am good at blocking things out!

In sixth grade, after writing a whole paper (in reality probably only 3 paragraphs) about Mexico we had to read our research to the rest of the class. Being an intensely shy child, this was a dreaded activity for me. On the day of my sharing our teacher was absent and we had a substitute. He was new to our school and looked like he would rather be doing anything in the world than being there. The students picked up on that vibe and most of the class was out of control all day, including my report about Mexico. I don't think I ever shared in a public school class. Feeling disconnected to my writing and sharing in groups were great sources of anxiety for me until I had a couple of awesome professors at college.

       One very unfortunate event happened in fourth grade. I had outgrown the basal readers and my teacher wanted to put me in a reading group across the hall with the sixth graders. There I was put into the lowest reading group with my brother who was in that class. It caused very bad feelings and was completely awkward for the both of us, especially since Tony had been held back in fourth grade. While I can't remember the name of the readings, they were really too hard for me. One reading was about a dog sweating and how they sweat through their mouths by panting. I got this word confused with sweeting. Why are dogs sweeting? The name Sean appeared in a text and I kept calling the boy Seen. I normal mistake. Did the teacher think to tell us how to pronounce the boy's name? She was mean and scary and I know I didn't dare ask. I wonder if Tony even remembers that it even happened.

       In sixth grade I was given the opportunity to teach a new fourth grader from Greece how to read. I was in the scary teacher's sixth grade class now, and was going back to the same fourth grade room that I had two years before. We started at the very basic level and we read together and did the workbooks for most of the year. She caught up with the reading level of the rest of the fourth graders by the end of the year. If she couldn't read a word, I read it for her and she repeated it. It helped that she was smart and motivated too. Even though I made her do much of the work, she had support and we could talk about the readings.

      When I went to Junior High School (7-9 grades) family problems overshadowed school in a big way. My mother and father got separated and there were very bad feelings. My siblings and I were left with little supervision and it was uncomfortable. I stayed at a friend's house up the street 85% of the time. My older sister was athletic and also played in the band. We shared a room. I don't ever remember discussing books with her. She kept journals, but I don't remember ever seeing her write in them. My brother may or may not have been ADHD, but he certainly drove me crazy. He constantly picked on me and I was often in tears. One thing he would do is repeat the same words over and over again, or ask me the same questions over and over until I would run out of the house, yelling "Leave me alone!" He thought it was funny. The pain of living under that constant stress and agitation still makes me want to cry and go hide. 
No one at home ever asked me about school, wanted to know if I needed anything, cared what my dreams were, or even saw me. Because I used to draw, my family made a big deal about that, which made me self-conscious for some reason. When I see students struggling now because of home life issues, I really feel for them.  Living in chaos is not helpful and I didn’t have the initiative to excel. My friends and I were left to our own limited devices for most of those years. I got in trouble for skipping school, smoking, stealing, and just being a negative jerk. I look back at those times and see such a sad, needy little girl who was really very kind and smart and good. I was just doing everything I could to tell the world that I was tough.

       My literary hero is my friend Kelleena. I spent most of my life at her house. She read constantly and skipped school all the time. She had troubles with math as well as her attitude, but she was and is damn smart!  (She's now a lawyer, even though she attended a total of about 1/2 a day of high school.) I remember her reading “Animal House” to me and discussing it with me the night before a test. It was a very fun experience, the first time I remember enjoying a deep conversation about a book. Amazingly I went on to read 1984 on my own. Kelly's house was all women. Sally, her mother was odd in a way I liked, with different boyfriends. Noreen was extremely artistic, was in the first ever alternate school when it was still down at the High School, and Kathleen who was quiet, but had a dry sense of humor, that I still appreciate. And then there was Kelleena. She changed her name when she was about 30. I am not sure why, but I still have a hard time with it. My first experiences at the Richards' home was creating plays in the basement. There were blankets hung and a stage. That basement later became party central.

       As I got older I did worse and worse in school. Partying, watching T.V., and hanging out sums up how I spent much of Junior High and High School. I was out with friends all the time and paid little attention to school work. What was the point I thought. In tenth grade we got the assignment of having to write a thesis paper which is just a research paper. I got so stressed out with the whole process, gathering information, note cards, putting them in order, making an outline, and creating coherent paragraphs! Complete overload. My mother’s friend at work ended up typing up my notecards into some kind of order and that paper got handed in. In eleventh grade, however, I did not hand in my paper and had to go to a night class for English in my senior year. Ironically, my brother was in that very same class. He really struggled, and it was excrutiatingly boring, and eventually dropped out. I finished although I have no real memory of it and was able to graduate. Any writing I did do at that time was the typical awkward adolescent broodings about boys, friends, family, and where was I going. I tried song writing as well, inspired by Pat Benetar.

The Richards women were all incredibly smart. They lived in an apartment complex and Sally worked as a nurse and had various other jobs to take care of her girls. She was way into the New Age, comic books, psychology, anything different or intense. She was way different from my mother who escaped not into books but into music and cigarettes. To this day I am always turned off by people who are way into music. However I did pick up on the whole New Age thing and read book after book about reincarnation. This idea fascinated me, that people actually get to live different lives. Growing up Catholic, we were taught that anyone non-catholic were inferior and I always wondered what would happen to them when they died. It probably wasn't taught as blatant as that but the message was loud and clear and I was really glad that I would be one of the "blessed" going to heaven. I did like Jesus, he was cool, who wouldn't? And in thinking about him, and studying his words, I came to the realization that he would not exclude grace from people who had different ideas or paths to God. What an amazing idea!

       After High School I spent a few years working and going to TC3 where I actually accumulated 30 credits. I had planned to move to Florida with my boyfriend Mike. My last year at school was devoted to finding both of us colleges in the Fort Lauderdale area. Mike was way smart and one in a long line of young Republican men that I would attract. He was cool even so. But when it came time to actually move, I couldn't. I was insecure about moving away from home and had fallen out of love with him after going through some emotional relationship stuff. Because I had no real focus or life plan, I decided it was time to college where I could at least have a chance at getting a better job or at least find love. I settled on Keuka College because that is where my sister went and they were hurting for students. Remembering my time in elementary school, where I was somewhat successful, I decided to go into teaching.

       Learning in college was just completely different from learning in high school. Maybe because I was a little older, had a plan, and had to take out loans, I worked harder than I had in years. My first essay was about a news story from the six o’clock news with Dan Rather. When I got my paper back it was a D. Now the teacher, Dr. Magnusen, (another hero of mine) who was a scientist, didn’t just hand the paper back and let it go. She took the time to talk to me about what was wrong with it and why it didn’t work. It didn't even have an introduction! She let me fix it and I got an A. The best memory I have is when I had a complete meltdown when I had to do an oral report of a book I read for British Literature and Film. Poor Dr. Richards. I showed up at his office the night of my report and told him I couldn't do it. I told him about the time I was in sixth grade and no one listened to me, I told him I was getting my period, and I told him I was having an anxiety attack. I cried and cried and he sat there and listened. After I calmed down he asked me what is the worse thing that would happen, and nothing I could come up with was really earth shattering. We agreed that he would have the other students schedule go first and then if I wanted to go too, he would say "Are there any other reports for tonight?" If I felt I could do it, I would say yes. I felt better as I went back to my room to try to write up something coherent to share. I still could only come up with four points about the book, but I did do my presentation that night and it wasn't bad! The other students asked lots of questions and I was able to answer them, because unlike in High School, I actually read the book! After that I did well in every class I took, graduating Magna Cum Laude. What an accomplishment. Still I felt dumb.

       I struggled for another 9 years, substituting on and off, waitressing, and basically existing because I didn’t feel secure in my abilities as a teacher. Trying to figure out who I am is what I obsessed over in my teens, twenties, and thirties. Before this identity crisis I never read much outside what was expected in school, much less write. I read many, many books on philosophy, religion, spiritualism, and New Age from Shirley MacLaine, Ram Das, HH Dalai Lama, Ramana Maharshi, and on and on. At this time I got very in to holistic healing, meditation, growing my own herbs and creating medicine's (which I experimented on my significant other at the time). I read more during this time than any other. I finally turned 40 and was no nearer to answering that question. And for the first time in many years, it was not a concern or constant worry.  

       Those years between graduating and actually getting a “real” teaching job were spent narcissistically thinking about who I am and why this or that happened and what does it all mean. That time was a copout. I didn’t feel good about myself. Still, I am happy for the things I studied, researched, written about, and practiced. Hopefully it opened this “small” mind to the real Big World, not just on a superficial level. During that time I studied holistic healing, grew many herbs, meditated, and created "medicine" and experimented with its effects on my significant other. Researching these things became a passion and any extra money I had went to all kinds of books on these subjects. History, religion, homeopathy, cooking, and anything that could take me out of the present moment was of interest to me.
For meditation class we studied some seriously intense books. There were other languages and interpretations to consider. Many beautiful ideas and hard concepts all designed to help the readers to find their true selves. Reading and writing at this time had moved me to a different level. So far I had learned to read for enjoyment, to read to learn how to do something, but now reading became a way to know more than what was presented. Sentences and ideas had to be thought through and discussed. I noticed how often we read something and are thinking about what is says instead of reading what it actually says. Needless to say there are shelves of very attractive but lonely, high level philosophy books from various religious traditions around the world at my house still. Maybe some day I will get to them!

      As for my identity as a teacher, that’s more tricky. I have never, not once, wanted to think of myself as a “teacher”. When I think of the word teacher it congers up images of straight-laced, judgemental, crabby, and autocratic women. That’s not me, or is it? Maybe that’s who I am to my students. How funny! My teachers were real people and unfortunately my memory is colored by the idea I have when I think of the word teacher. Where do we get these ideas? Parents, television, books, actual teachers? Society teaches us so much without us even knowing or willingly allowing it.  
The kind of teacher I have always wanted to be is one that inspires her students to want to learn and to do the best they can. Not very unusual really, it's probably what all teachers want to do. i find it hard that even with the education I have had, and continue to have, I am not able to reach all the students that I see every year. It's very frustrating! Teaching takes up so much time and energy each day, it feels like there is very little left for me at the end of the day. I used to paint and haven't done that in years.

        

History of Pre-Institute

One of the traditions of the Summer Institute is to start each day with a history of the previous day. Each history is created by one member of the group in whatever format they would like. As a result the history becomes a way to showcase yourself as a writer and to try out new ideas, genres, and formats. The history is intended to be a fun way to reconnect with the learning we have done.

We write histories for a variety of reasons: they help us to remember what we have been thinking about, they entertain, inform, or challenge us, they help the writer to synthesize a day's worth of learning into a short presentation, and they allow us to explore different ways to present information. By sharing our histories on the blog we create an archive of our experience and help those who are not in the room connect with the work we are doing.

For the history of Pre-institute I chose to develop a demo that focuses on close reading strategies. We used our notes about identity as the text for this demo. We read and annotated the text, shared our thinking on the text, and then synthesized that thinking in the form of a poem. The poems we wrote are shared in the comments below. I hope you enjoy reading them!

Literacy Identity Autobiography by Jen Liddy

Reading happened early, easily and often, but it wasn’t a collaborative experience. I read alone and spent all my free time devouring books, systematically consuming any author’s entire collection: Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Francine Pascal. One summer afternoon, I stopped dead in the middle of a Nancy Drew mystery. I realized, with shock, there was a formula! These books revealed themselves to be the same story disguised in different characters and settings. Carolyn Keene had duped me. Furthermore, I was disappointed: I still had over 10 unread Nancy Drew books sitting on my corner shelf, awaiting attention, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish them, bringing much guilt upon myself. I was done with children’s books and went looking for more sophisticated reading.

Reading in my family’s house was not a sport for the cultivated or urbane. Trashy titles were thoughtlessly thrown about the coffee table, and no one stopped me when I picked up Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.  A tween, I was thrilled to be thrown into the abyss of adult literature; it was so corrupt, naughty, and prurient. Whether my mother ever noticed I was reading this smut, I don’t know, but I began another round of wolfing down as many books as Sheldon would author and was immensely disappointed when I finished this list, so I moved onto Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark. Reading helped me escape from my mother and unhappy family, a pastime she could not begrudge me of. It was an escape that earned me nerd status among family and friends, but it also gained me approval from adults, and I felt desperately grown up.

I truly identified myself as a reader, easily excelling at reading in school and at home. However, there was never any overt discussion about the different types of reading that one is expected to do. The reading I was doing was purely escapist: I did not process it or analyze it. Comprehension and plot, characterization and conflict were ideas that I could easily discern, but frankly, if asked about themes or symbols or irony or the social importance of a text, I’d be flummoxed. Reading obviously got more difficult in high school, when offerings like The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick were on the menu. For the first time in my life, I struggled with reading and I had no framework to understand why. Suddenly, reading was no longer fun, easy, or enjoyable, but I slogged through and managed to still be a good, effective reader, albeit a much more unhappy one.

This very struggle, as I see it today, led me to become a reluctant English major in college. There was nothing else I was really good at or wanted to be, but I knew I was a fast and good reader. So, I shrugged my shoulders and became an English major, barking the caveat that “I don’t want to be a teacher” and “I am just doing it because I can write papers instead of taking a test” to anyone who would listen. But at college I found I had a knack for talking about literature with others and could bang out a paper in a few hours. Once a strong, independent reader, at college I discovered that I only thrived in an interactive, interpersonal environment. I’d struggle if forced to analyze in isolation, and I constantly questioned my literacy abilities. I felt less intelligent than my peers and fearfully avoided classes like poetry and Shakespeare. I now see it was a lack of guidance that crippled me, and I wish I could go back and tell myself, “Jen, you are an interpersonal learner who processes best verbally.” Knowing and embracing that would have instilled a confidence that I would not have for fifteen years to come.

A new shift in my literacy and identity happened after college: I had become a reading snob, thinking that as an English major, I should only engage with ‘real literature’.  And it was on a daily, monotonous commute from Long Island to Manhattan that I saw everyone reading a new author, John Grisham. I was disgusted; I would not read that trash. But the commute was long and John Irving had just broken my heart with A Prayer for Owen Meany. I had to give this Grisham a try. I confess: I was hooked. And thus, my literacy identity throughout my mid-twenties was punctuated and defined by learning to ‘never say never’. This philosophy allowed me to intersperse my reading, to not judge it. I could mull over Hamill’s Snow in August and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but it was also okay to blow through each of Grisham’s newly-published books. It allowed me to enjoy a bus ride in silence with Groom’s Forrest Gump but to seek out a book club to process my thoughts on Ondaatjee’s The English Patient or Schlink’s The Reader.  It allowed me to realize that of course I couldn’t understand Melville or Hawthorne in high school! These complex novels created deep thematic schemas that were just impossible for the undeveloped sixteen-year-old mind to comprehend without facilitation.

I had the epiphany that there had to be better, more relevant ways to teach classic authors. Wait! Why only teach the classics in high school? I fantasized about how to help real kids connect with fancy books and deep ideas. Ultimately, on those cross-town bus rides, I began to listen to that inner voice, the one that said, “Maybe, perhaps, you might become an English teacher. Maybe you can make these books understandable, relatable, and palatable to high school kids. Maybe you can even introduce them to the cool contemporary books that you love so much.” And I did the distasteful and unthinkable thing: I became an English teacher.

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.