What is Literacy to Me

I have always thought about literacy as the ability to read and write. I never thought about it as any other way. I came to this conclusion by just hearing people use it in everyday life. I hear about the literacy rate in certain countries being low. I hear about how literacy and how everyone should be able to read and write. I hear the terms illiterate and literate be thrown around in the same context as literacy. I hear the president talk about the literacy rate in America and how it’s on the rise. I have just come to associate literacy with the ability of reading and writing. However as I progress in my college career I come to learn that it’s a little more than just reading and writing, how much more? I don’t know yet what I do know is that it also entails comprehension because it serves no purpose if kids can’t comprehend what they are reading. So not only do children have to have the ability to read and write but only the ability to comprehend what they are reading and apply the lessons learned to everyday life.

I came to this realization after becoming a tutor for autistic children. I realized that these kids can read and write reasonably well but when it came to comprehension the kids were lost. I would have one of my kids, Joseph, who would read a short story all by himself with no problems but when it came to answering some simple questions about the story he would have no idea what to do. It was as if he didn’t read the story at all. I attributed this to the autism and found was to get around this mostly by just rewording the question to a simpler way that he would understand. However later on I began tutoring children with no mental problems and found that after these kids would finish reading a story and try to answer the questions at the end they would come up with their own answer that would be remotely related to the story it was if they read the story a week ago and were trying to recall what happened. These kids were about half right in their answer. When it came down to it, it was all about the kids and their ability to comprehend what they are reading. Not just read the words on the page but to really understand what they are reading.

For these reasons when I become a teacher I will not only hold my students responsible for attaining the ability to read but also to comprehend what they are reading. It really serves no purpose to have a student read a book and not understand what he or she just read. The reason why I would want my students to understand what they are reading is so that we can discuss what we are reading. However, even if they don’t completely understand what we are reading I want them to be thinking about it. By them merely thinking about the reading it shows me that they are trying to comprehend the reading.

A typical day in my English class would start out with a discussion of the assigned reading. I would give them a simple question to prompt them to start to think about what they read. The simplest would be “What do you think about it so far?” Then I would ask if anybody is lost; this would open the room to anybody who doesn’t understand the reading or has just been reading without paying attention to what they are reading. After that I would try and relate the main themes of the story to things they already know and understand, thereby giving them a new way of looking at the story and a new way of trying to understand it. Overall it would be more of a way of trying to tap into each students “channel” of learning to help them better understand what we are reading and by providing a different ways of viewing and relating to the reading I will try and achieve this, because even if they can read that doesn’t mean the understand what they are reading my goal will be for them to comprehend and apply the lesson, if there is one, that the reading provides. If I can’t tap into the students “channel” of learning I will at least give them the tools so that they can figure it out for themselves. I don’t want to leave anybody behind because I myself have been in that situation and that’s when a student gives up and just “rolls with the punches” and merely tries to get along. Instead of them giving up I would want them to ask questions and interact in discussion. I want them to at least try and figure out what we are doing and why we are doing it. I know this is all in a perfect world and in a perfect classroom but we’ll see how it goes.