Literacy is a large and often unwieldy concept. Qualifying myself as a literate person, particularly in light of the fact that I intend to teach reading, has been something of a challenge. I can read, and have been able to for more than 25 years. But does that make me truly literate? I can speak out the sounds and define the words that are used in texts of all lengths and formats, but does that mean I understand them? To me, literacy means more than being able to speak what is written on a page, it is to truly understand what is being communicated on that page. To have a satisfactory understanding of what the author is trying to say and, more than that, in what world they are trying to say it.
Acquiring literacy has been a long process that began a long time ago for me, as it has for all of us. When I was young my mother, who had a long love affair with romance books, made it a priority to teach me how to read. I had the advantage of being the eldest. As such my parents were still full of the piss and vinegar of new parenthood. EVERYTHING would be done right EVERY second of the day. So they bought up as many reading programs as they could. My earliest memories are of colorful letters sprawled across the pages of a professionally prepared plastic binder sitting on my mother's armoire in Germany. The pressure to succeed was intense and I was reading books by myself by the time I was 6.
But the key there was by myself I never enjoyed reading. Too much pressure had been attached to it by my intent parents. My baby brothers arrived and with their arrival came a lot less attention on me. Only child to oldest child, we all know the tale. Thankfully, though, that meant that they weren’t hovering over me to see if I had read the new book they bought for me. I could go weeks without turning a page and they had no time to notice in the sleep-deprived blur that is dealing with three boys, two of which still awoke at all hours, terrified or hungry. No one had time to make me do my reading chores.
One day my mother brought home a book from college. She had fallen asleep on the couch as soon as she’d gotten home, exhausted from her sleepless nights and full classes. Her backpack fell open and atop all the scholastic knickknacks and papers was a book. It was clad in sky blue and a stern-looking white bearded man holding lightning, wearing a strange kind of crown, or something of the like, was staring at me from the backpack. I pulled it out and opened up a world I hadn’t ever seen before.
The man on the front was a god, not God, but a god. Ruler of the universe Zeus had slain mighty beings called titans, creatures that should have been gods in their own right, to calm the earth and make it habitable for the people who would live in it. He was ancient beyond human lifespan, so his white hair and beard. He was the mightiest of the gods and his was the power to strike down his foes from a distance, which explained the lightning bolt he was holding. He was also king among gods, so explaining the crown or the laurel as I would eventually come to know it.
Suddenly I began to see that reading could be more than a chore, that it could make sense of the images of the world that confused me. Reading could also be unendingly fun, which began my own love affair with text.
The Greek myths gave themselves to the birth of a love for fantasy. I began my fantasy adventure with The Hobbit. After that, I continued consuming the Lord of the Rings and found myself reading Harry Potter. In the Chamber of Secrets, I discovered a secret of my own. The power in fantasy is that by tailoring a world to tell your tale you can tell powerful secrets to the world in a way they can take deeply to heart.
Video games may be a surprising place to find insight into literacy, but even there I found things that changed how I relate to the world. In Skyrim a Roleplaying game that can take days worth of time to complete, I found the power of investment and context. Literally, fourty nine hours into the game, fighting the dragon scourge, I came upon a dragon who had betrayed his evil brothers and offered mankind freedom from their draconic masters. After hours of fighting thinking that he had been my ally I discovered that once he had been the most ruthless killer of the entire dragon cadre. When I confronted him he asked a question I still struggle with: "Which is better, to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?" I was left with a choice, to slay him and gain a great power, and allies, or to leave him in the peace he had earned.
Because he had done so much and meditated on his own actions, I couldn't kill him like many people had. Though were he just another dragon it would have been simple, I regularly hunted others of his kind.The time I invested in him and the past he had fought so hard to redeem himself from made even considering killing him for power twist my heart. Even if an authority had ordered me to do so.
I had learned many years before that a title or authority doesn't imbue someone with wisdom, grace, or anything else. Disney taught me this lesson in the form of Judge Claude Frollo. That more than earning a title or a degree, that someone must truly be what they aim to become if they want to be worthy of their title, whether that title is a politician, a ruler, or a teacher.
Even the words one uses to describe something must be in line with who they want to be, who they are to become, if they are to be trusted. I learned this from Bernie Sanders who had caught my adoration long before his presidential run. Through his impassioned calls for equity and considerations of the vulnerable in a committee meeting on benefits, I felt his compassion simply because of the words he chose to use to express his concerns. He talked about people like they were people, not statistics like most of the other politicians were talking.
It is all of these lessons together that crafted me into the reader, the writer, and most of all the English teacher that I am today. That my classroom must have the love of reading, the joy of reading, and the power of investment to create a world in which I can share the secrets of literature and writing with my students. That I must be more than a teacher, I must earn the trust and authority needed to guide my students through their own discoveries through both my actions and my words.
I owe so much to one weak zipper on my mother's bookbag so very many years ago.
