Literacy Profile
I consider myself a reader. A reader not only a reader for content, but more like a reader ingesting the words, the formats, the ideas, and the tones in one rather large breath. I find the enjoyment of reading in books and plays sprinkled with wit and coated with brilliantly developed characters and plot. I enjoy perusing around the shelves of the fiction section and inching towards intriguing titles with a grasping hand.
As I recall, the very first book I mastered was Dr. Seuss' Hop on Pop. The pictures and letters finally formed meaning with me at nighttime in my bed around the age of four and a half. For the next four years or so, I read when necessary, not fully grasping the grand span of ideas that could be found in books. One summer, when I was around the age of 8, my mother came up with a reward system for reading. The reward was monetary for every book read. This was the only summer that my mother ever offered such a reward for I believe I read at least 25 books. This sparked my love of reading and I no longer read for a physical reward; my bank of knowledge of literature and vocabulary grew immensely. As an adolescent, I filled my reading time with books of adventure. Series including, The Boxcar Children, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Twilight all lined my shelves along with many Border's purchases and of course the Classics. I was drawn to Adventure, Mystery, and Classical fiction novels.
In school, I usually enjoyed reading the novels chosen. Some of which included, Fahrenheit 451, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", The Devil's Arithmetic, Huckleberry Finn, and "Death of a Salesman". These titles I would consider to be classics or books that could teach an element of literature specifically. I would consider myself a very motivated reader, but I also know that there were a number of classmates that were reluctant to read or neglected the literature all together. For my own students, I would take an interactive approach to teaching literature so that they can see that it is not a bunch of letters on a page, but a series of well-crafted ideas strung together in a memorable arrangement of words that elicit an emotion response. I see literacy as not only reading, but a thirst for understanding.
