Reid Yoho

Reflection Letter
I truly found that this writing experience was beneficial overall to me. I hadnt ever looked back to the evolution of my literacies in life. I found that it was generally easy to talk about the content that I wanted doing the process of writing the paper. One of the main obstacles that I encountered, however, was the fact that I had to make it flow from point to point and from paragraph to paragraph. Reading it back I feel as if I couldve done a better job making the paper flow. Additionally, I feel like my introduction was fairly strong, but that my conclusion left room for improvement. In the end, I feel like the entire process was a positive experience for myself that I enjoyed.

Reid Yoho

The Ups and Downs of Advancing My Own Personal Literacy

Throughout my life my level of literacy has continued to grow exponentially. I look at myself now and clearly see that my ability to read, write, and understand many other forms of literacy is at an adult level. However, when I ponder how I exactly got to this status of literacy I struggle to see a steady progression through my life. I dont remember the moment I first learned how to say or write my name. I also dont recall when I first really learned how to construct sentences into organized paragraphs. Certainly I have no recollection of the first writing assignment I was given in my life. With this all said, is there any way I can look back over my life and see how I progressed with my writing and reading abilities? In short, I must say that I believe so. Actually, when I think of literacy concerning my early childhood the first memory that I recollect is when in Kindergarten I came home dissatisfied with how I had been performing on writing assignments. I had to bring a letter home from my teacher to show my parents that I had been underperforming with my writing. From that moment to the immediate years afterward I can remember constantly saying that I hated writing. I also looked down upon myself because a friend of mine during Kindergarten and First Grade was performing extremely well in his writing. Instead of using this as motivation and trying to do better with my writing I instead just gave up on attempting doing my best on anything that involved me writing. I maintained this same mentality all the way from Kindergarten to Third Grade. During Third Grade my teacher came up to me one day when she was working with students individually, looking over how they were doing in each subject, and saw that I was doing very

Reid Yoho

well in Science, History, and even Math, looking by Im not entirely sure how that was happening, but I was struggling in reading and writing with a C in those two areas. I couldnt read and comprehend the content of what I was reading and I remember never being able to write down what I was trying to say. Since my teacher realized I was having all these issues with literacy she offered to help me become a much better writer and to comprehend reading material. She allowed me to stay after school and helped work with me on improving, specifically, my writing skills. I stayed after school basically each day for roughly a month before my writing skills reached where she knew they could reach. She continued to give me advice throughout the year and I, of course, listened to all the advice that she was giving me and before I knew it, by the end of the school year, I was getting As and Bs in the subjects of writing and reading. I cant say that at this point in my life I appreciated the importance of reading and writing, but I knew that I needed to be good in both areas to excel scholastically. I worked hard at developing better reading and especially writing habits and because of this hard work I continued to excel. On my Fourth Grade writing test I earned one of the higher grades in my class, Im not sure about the exact grade I received, and I was extremely satisfied with the outcome. The great outcome on the writing test really excited me and made all the work I had done to better my writing skills worth it. Allow me to talk briefly about how the culture around me affected how I wrote, spoke, and understood what I read in the early years of my life. My parents were both born in a small town in West Virginia and lived only a few miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. However, I was born here in Charlotte and have lived the entirety of my life here in North Carolina. This gives me a different accent than most and also a different vocabulary. For example, when I was little I was taught to say pop instead of soda, because pop was what my parents said, and this

Reid Yoho

confused many people I knew. Regarding my accent, I do have what Id consider a southern accent, but I dont think I have as southern an accent as most in North Carolina do simply because I learned how to speak from two parents who were born and raised in a different part of the country. Returning to discussing literacy in the sense of writing and reading, I must say that up until this point in my life, Third and Fourth Grade, I had always viewed literacy in purely an educational sense, as most do. This view was slightly altered whenever in Fifth Grade I become good friends with another student. The only issue was that we werent in any classes together. Because of this, at lunch, we would hand each other notes to read in the immediate future. This continued for months throughout the year and looking back I can see how writing constant notes to a friend actually helped me with my grammar and spelling. After Elementary School I was genuinely interesting in reading, in particular reading the Series of Unfortunate Events books, and writing occasional notes to friends. However, this all changed in Seventh Grade. I was still, at this time, mildly interested in reading and writing. What changed in Seventh Grade was that I began to struggle in my English Class and felt like I was constantly being put down by my English teacher. I gave up on reading extensively and it showed because my scores in reading, and writing as well, but more so with reading, were dropping at an extreme pace. Before Seventh Grade I had been scoring well above average in my reading and writing assignments. But because of my lack of motivation and affirmation from my English Teacher I fell down to scoring just average on many of these reading and writing assignments.

Reid Yoho

Although I have spoken almost exclusively about literacy concerning reading and writing, you can be literate in other areas of life as well. During this time in my life, middle school, where I was very apathetic towards focusing on many areas of school, somewhat surprisingly, I was very interested in one certain area within school, technology. As a little child I was always very intrigued by videogames and computer games. I remember as a child playing on these certain forms of technology for hours daily. I was on these devices for such long periods of time that by age eight or nine I already knew twice as much about computers compared to my mom. This is even more compelling considering that my mom works from her computer daily. My interest in computers and technology as a whole really grew at an accelerated rate in middle school. My favorite classes were always classes that involved computers. I loved learning how to work all the Microsoft programs such as PowerPoint and Word; I also loved learning how to type at a quicker rate and to even make my own simple games through HTML. These classes I took and excelled in gave me a sense of accomplishment because, while I wasnt doing so well in other areas of school, I was one of the best students in classes involving computers. Outside of simply computers, I even loved taking photography class and learning how to operate a camera properly. I may not spend as much time these days on computers or playing videogames, but I undoubtedly know how to operate many devices and I still love to be around new technology as often as I possibly can. Im sure my love, appreciation, and somewhat expertise will only help me as I continue to progress in life. Once again back to the continuing ups and downs my literacy when in the realm of reading and writing. Like I mentioned earlier, during middle school I became careless when it came to improving my reading and writing abilities. I only got interested in increasing my literacy in Tenth Grade out of pure necessity. As many other students remember, we had to take

Reid Yoho

a writing test in Tenth Grade. I became immediately worried that I wouldnt be able to perform up to par on the writing test so I made sure that I would prepare myself as much as I possibly could before the test came around. I corrected as many of my issues with spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation that I could and I ended up doing fairly well when the writing exam came around. However, since I wasnt improving my literacy out of interest, but out of necessity, I quickly went back to paying no attention to writing, and also reading, when I received my test results. I didnt become interested and motivated to do exceptionally well in both reading and writing until the following year in Eleventh Grade. I came into the English class expecting it to be just another class with nothing thatll stand out after the semester. I was incredibly wrong about this assumption. Coach Barry was the name of my English teacher and he sincerely got me excited about the books we read. I remember reading 1984, The Catcher in The Rye, and The Great Gatsby. I truly enjoyed reading each book and Coach Barry was able to allow the class to have active discussions about each novel to increase our interest levels even more. At the same time I was becoming interested in reading I also began to write daily and it, for some reason, allowed me to feel like I was opening up to someone other than myself even though no one else would read the bulk of whatever I choose to write. Through this daily writing I found a large amount of peace and allowed much of my stress and pressure in life to drift away through the words I wrote on each page. During this time where I became active in writing and reading once again I became interested in public speaking. As a child, age ten or eleven I believe, I had an opportunity to speak in front of a few hundred people and, although I didnt say much, I loved it and I felt comfortable being in front of such a large amount of people. I dont think I liked the attention as

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much as I liked the adrenaline rush that it gave me. I was generally a very socially awkward person from Elementary School up until around Eleventh Grade and because of this I was never excellent at talking to people one on one. However, whenever we had projects that we had to present in front of the class I was, oddly enough, comfortable with getting up in front of the class while much of the class dreaded the moment their name was called to present their project. I was able to take advantage of this skill of public speaking and display it when for the Senior Exit Project at my school we had to present our project to a panel of three or four judges. I was also able to display writing and research skills that were up to par for what I was supposed to display. I spent what felt like centuries working on the research and writing portions of the project and I ended up doing well. I also practiced presenting my project to anyone who would sit down for a few minutes to listen. In the end, I was able to make the judges smile, laugh, and enjoy my presentation. Overall, the experience was very rewarding because I earned a 98 percent on the project, well above my expectations going into the project. Reading through all that I have written above I realize that, even though it was unclear to me, there was indeed a fairly clear progression of my journey through literacy. There were truly times in my life where I loved reading and writing, and there were stages in my life where I despised to even read or write a sentence on a page. I can actually find events in my life that influenced my personal literacy, which has somewhat surprised me. I can also see how my culture and literacy in other areas, such as technology and public speaking, have contributed to the person that I am as of today. Although I came into this paper truly skeptical that Id be able to see a clear progression of my literacy, I can say that I can see how I have progressed with my literacies over my lifespan. The literacies that I have learned and became literate in have also molded me into the successful person that I am today.