Ryan Minter Literacy Narrative Sometimes its hard to remember your earliest memories of learning a certain language or how

to read and write. When I think back, I can still remember when I was no older than four years old and my mother reading Is Your Mama a Llama by Deborah Guarino to me every night before I went to sleep. Those memories seem as if they were a lifetime ago; even though it was only fourteen years ago. My language has developed and changed so much since then, however, without the literacy timeline that occurred in my life, I feel as if I would be an entirely different person with a different perspective on language development. Every individual has a literacy timeline containing many significant events that affected that timeline either negatively or positively. Personally, one of my most significant events was growing up on an Air Force Base on the United States Territory, Guam, and then moving back to the states and adopting an entirely different learning style. When I was younger, my parents use to always read me stories. It only made sense, I was too young to read them and all I could really do was follow along and listen. Theres a video of when my mom went to South Korea when I was a little over a year old and its a video of her reading to me. Keep in mind that I had no ability to follow along with her, but that was my first moment of literacy in my entire life, just like many other individuals. Many of us start out just like I did with our parents reading to us. I think that is one of the most common ways and easiest ways for all of us to learn. I know for a fact that I started out listening to my parents read to me and then eventually I began to read along with them which helped developed my literacy skills prior to elementary school. Once I began elementary school on Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, I felt so close to my classmates and teachers since the Air Force Base was so small the classes were really small too. Most classes had maybe fifteen kids at the most in them because there wasnt that many kids on base. Some of my greatest friends and influences were in my classes while I was there. Ill never forget three major influences from living there. The first was my best friend and classmate Brian. We did everything together. He was literally my best childhood friend as I was growing up there. We talked exactly the same and did the same things. Just talked the same way as another person affected my social skills of my language. The second person was my fifth grade pen-pal on base, Franklin. I remember him so vividly because he use to write to me all the time while I was in kindergarten. He had one of the biggest roles of my social development because I was reading advanced writing and language usage which helped to develop my literacy skills. He also use to create conversations with me and with me being a lot younger than he was, he use to challenge my grammar and social skills which helped to develop my language also. The third person was my great friend Amir. He was competitive opponent in sports while I lived there. No matter what it was, even if it came to school activities, I did not want to lose to him. He helped to develop my social skills and interactions while playing sports because when I played against him, it was always competitive. Basically another dimension of my language was developed just through playing sports and having a sense of competition developing it and pushing it to be better each and every game. The skills and language set that I learned through those three transferred to the classroom while I was learning. There was always constant teacher-student interaction during my time there due to the fact that the classes were so small. I think that having teachers with a better sense of literacy and language talking to me constantly helped to develop

my language and literacy skills because I wanted to be on the same level as they were. Halfway through the first grade I moved from Guam to North Carolina because my mom retired from the Air Force that year. Even though I wasnt in the school system on base that long, I learned many literacy and language skills that I feel like I still use even today. When we first moved back, it was just me and my mom and I attended Idewild Elementary School. As I tell this part of my story, keep in mind that Im a first grader just after my sixth birthday when I attended this school. Now, when I was younger, I was always shy and never really talked much. I mostly kept to myself and always followed what the adults and older kids told me. Makes sense right? Thats what all the little kids do right? So, I walk into my first class and I can still remember that old desk type of smell that irritated my nose when I walked in. All the kids stared at me and the sad part was that the teacher didnt even introduce me to the class, she just told me to go sit down at the back of the class. So I sit down at a table with another kid sitting next to me and everybody is working on something and my teacher lays a workbook down in front of me with the pages open and I have no clue what Im doing besides the basic sentences and thankfully the day was almost over when I joined the class. Two weeks into the class, I got put into another class and I asked my mom what did I do wrong? I thought I was in trouble or something. It turned out that I was in a second grade class the entire time! I couldnt believe it. How is that even possible? Technically I was supposed to be in a kindergarten based on my age and I was in a second grade class. The ironic part of this entire story is that when I was actually in second grade, I left that school and attended Harrisburg Elementary and it was almost like a culture shock. I walked into the class and everyone turned around and smiled. My teacher sat me down and she introduced me to the girl that sat next to me who would become my girlfriend the next year, but I wont go into that. Anyways, back to the story, as I traveled through elementary school and middle school, they curriculum pounded into all the kids brains that there is only one way to write and thats the teachers way. What made it hard was the fact that we had a different English teachers each year. It got to the point that kids started just following the rubric and stopped using as much creativity as possible because they wanted the highest grade based off of the rubric and not how well their writing was. I remember my seventh and eighth grade teachers were just awful. It felt to me as if I didnt learn a thing in any of those two classes. Many of the concepts and practices from middle school transferred into high school. I had a bunch of research papers, essays on books and honors papers about absolutely nothing. For pre-calculus, I had to write a paper on computing machines simply because it was required that I write a paper for that class and it was still the basic rubric styled writing with three body paragraphs with an introduction and conclusion. The more and more I wrote these papers, the more I began to hate them because it allows for no room of diversity and creativity. It makes sense that you grade everyone off of the same rubric but I simply couldnt stand it. My literacy and language benefitted from this system to an extent because I became so good at writing that certain style. It was almost like a curse because I hated it, but I was good it because I had done it so much. The only year that stood out to me and that was probably the most influential was my tenth grade English class with my teacher Mrs. CassSolomon. Most of the time, the kids of the class just referred to her as Mrs. Cass. She was a little short, she had brown hair and was always able to talk. Our school was growing so our classrooms began to have less space and more desks. We had close to thirty kids in the class and the room was always full of pictures and the bookshelf was stacked top to bottom with books.

Every day, the board was always filled with announcements and the objectives of the day along with posters and crafts that she had collected over the years. When the year first started out, it seemed just like the rest of my English classes with the traditional honors paper with the three body paragraph introduction and conclusion type of paper. Halfway through though, everything seemed to suddenly change. She started taking writing and adding creativity to it. It started when we had journals to write and it used to be the first ten minutes of every class to write about absolutely anything. There was no subject, no topic, just anything that you felt like writing down. After she began doing that, we had a writing assignment that was like no other writing assignment that I had ever had before. It was an assignment that was simply either a two and a half page paper Times New Roman font, or a two-thousand word paper in any font you wanted. The strangest part about this paper was that it was about any topic that you wanted to write about. Anything that you wanted and your heart desired. I chose religion and it was the first time in my entire literacy career that I felt as if I had complete and total control over every single aspect of my paper. I felt as if it was completely mine and that I could claim it entirely as my own work and my own writing. That was definitely one of the biggest, if not the biggest moments of my writing and language because it was the first time I felt as if I had my own voice in my writing. After writing that paper, it never was hard to write journals or research papers because it became easier to use my own words and not the work of others as much as I did before I typed that piece. The great thing about Mrs. Cass was not only did she give us the freedom to express ourselves, but she constantly pushed us further. Even though my literacy timeline is somewhat strange, I feel like all of these moments and many more shaped me into the individual I am today. The traveling and change of cultures when I was younger allowed me to develop social skills and my language as I met new people in new areas and school. The constant teaching of typing papers a certain way helped me to develop discipline and persistence in my writing. Then the sudden jump from discipline and structured writing into free-form and creative writing helped to develop my own voice and style of writing. Even now, my literacy is still being shaped by the individuals around me and classes that Im taking. The more dimensions I add to my writing, the better off Ill be and my writing will only become better and more influential and effective the more I develop. Only time will tell whats next for my literacy, Im ready to discover it though.