Secondary Literacy Experiences

    For the most part my secondary experiences with literature were rather positive. My middle school English teacher had quite the impact on my literature experience as she took time out to explain things and make them relative to us. She wasn't always my favorite, but helped me understand literature better, and dig deeper. We had a project for a book we read (The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien), and we were allowed to create any multimedia project that represented something major from the scene, or how we thought a character might look. I chose to do Smaug, the monster who lived in the mountain, and after school for about a week or so she would help me papier-mâché my character, and questioned why I chose this character, and how I planned on incorporating it in my presentation, it was conversations like these that helped made me question literature, and the book we read. Originally I was not into this book, and when she gave us this project midway through it changed how I was looking at the book, now I had to find a character who appealed to me, or made interested me.

    In high school. during my freshman year my English teacher gave me a lot of literature exposure. We read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Odyssey by Homer, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and multiple poems/short stories by Edgar Allen Poe (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, The Raven, and The Cask of Amontillado), throughout this class, along with other books/poems, but these are the ones that I remember vividly. Before we even started school, we had books we had to read before starting the year, which prepared us for some of the harder literature and texts we were going to read in this class.

    I really loved the story To Kill a Mockingbird and the role in played in racial injustice and segregation. I think this was a book that fit so perfectly to our time, and opened up the eyes of readers to what happened in that time period. I think this book is so pivotal in learning, and showing students what friendship can do, how a man nearly lost his life for an incident he didn't commit, and Scout's father was the one to defend him, and what was right, in a town and time where everyone wanted to sentence him to death. It showed that if people can look past someone's exterior and really get to know them, they could be surprised at who they appear to be.

    With a vast majority of the books, I didn't like them at much as first, because it felt like work, not reading for pleasure, however afterwards I realized I really loved reading these books. I think that this is a lot of students realities, but if teachers can integrate required textbooks in a way that don't feel like a chore makes a difference. In my learning I felt it's because we always had worksheets to go with a certain amount of reading, and being graded on how I interpreted text really deterred me from wanting to read some of these books, as opposed to when I could sit and read for fun, and engage with it how I wanted to. Even though my freshman teacher made us do worksheets with these books, he related it, and actually taught us to look at the messages the author was trying to convey. She helped me look at literature differently, and explore all the possibilities of text, and see elements included in different works and compare/contrast them.

    Afterwards most literature was completed at San Jac, so it was a bit different in how we looked and did things. In my free time, I've been able to go back and read some of these books, and read their follow up stories (if there was one), and was able to continue in the journey, or experience it all over again in a new way. For my own students I want them to be able to have fun with text, and not feel reading is a chore like I did at times when I was in school. I also plan on incorporating choice with my students, I want our readings to be more of a book club setting, where we bring what we were able to take away from the book(s), and how we feel. I believe that even in this setting, we can still bring our students attention to what we want them to learn, by simple redirection.