Literacy Narrative

The first memory I have of my Literacy Narrative is the fifth grade. This year I had
Mrs. Montgomery. She was a cool lady and a great teacher but for her class you had to
choose one large novel to read throughout the year, a task that I had no interest in
completing. The only requirements were that the book have no illustrations and it had to
be a legitimate novel, not just a quick paperback. I chose the book Eragon by
Christopher Paolini for my fifth grade read, and got started on it with the first silent
reading day of the year. At first I was expecting nothing out of the book except for
miserable hour and a half every Friday afternoon during class. I ended up finding quick
interest in the book though, the detailed descriptions of characters and landscapes
combined with the intense plot kept me reading. This was my first time reading a book
that actually took time to develop its plot and had a complex narrative that told a story
that was deeper than just the words written down. I picked up on the fact that even
though there was what I had in front of me in the book, there were still lots of things to
discover about the characters and plot just from context clues. Knowing this kept me
interested in the book as it kept getting better working towards its climax. Since the
book has a bit of a mystical or unrealistic plot, it really showcased the flexibility of
language and literacy. The book contained numerous made up lands, people, animals,
humanoids, languages and traditions. All of which were completely created of just the
words that made them in the book, yet they seemed like real ancient cultures and
peoples of a whole different world, just because they were written in such a realistic
manner. After reading Eragon I eventually went on to finish the whole line of novels it
was a part of, and had continued interest in books on mysterious, unexplainable things.
The style of writing is interesting to me in these books as they have to carefully walk the
line of reality and fiction while not obviously showing which parts of the book are which,
creating the mystery. This style of writing helped inspire my own which is usually riddled
with intense descriptions and elaborate wordings to help myself navigate along the lines
of fact and fiction in writing pieces.

The most memorable part of my literacy narrative is my experiences my senior

year with my English IV and Philosophy teacher, Matthew Sneed. Mr. Sneed was a
pretty casual guy from an impressive background, but most importantly he was an
excellent teacher. He treated his job with an attitude I had never seen before, as a high
school senior, a teacher that really wanted his students to learn what he had to teach
them that badly. Even further than that, what he had to teach was so useful and
interesting it made the class a great experience. This was also my last semester of high
school, a time in ones academic career where finding the motivation to actually go
through all the motions regarding school work is harder than usual. This class made
putting in the work easier than I had ever imagined for my senior year. My day started
with Sneed for English IV, a class he ran like a college style writing course. We used
multi-modal concepts, wrote papers that were expected to have appropriate content for
the prompt and grammar and read literature that we would have to analyze in depth to
find everything the author was trying to say. He taught me writing processes that I still
use along with analyzing processes for assessing prompts. In the second half of my day
I had Sneed for Philosophy, a class that helped me learn incredibly. Sneed taught the
only philosophy class offered to students in at least Wake County, I believe it was all of
North Carolina at the time though. In this class he went through the evolution of thought
from the beginning of modern philosophers beginning with Thales. Getting this second
part of the day in with Sneed taught me more than any class I had ever taken before.
He was able to combine what we already knew about language and show us how it
helped form the world as we know it today. The thoughts and words that people had
been using for tens of thousands of years were the same ones we use today to express
ourselves and communicate. While how we say what we are trying to communicate has
evolved over the years, the main idea of communication has not, and that is literacy.
Sneed taught me how to understand language like I never could have imagined. As the
year went on the ideas taught in each class became more complex and intertwined as
we learned that philosophy and everything associated with thought, was really just an
expression of language. This idea culminated in our final project for the class where we
had to replicate an experience and showcase it to the class. My group decided to do a
dream, we had a brief speaking part before it to set the scene in the heads of our
classmates with a sleepy mindset, then we played a video that showed numerous
activities being done a little oddly, just as a dream would, and then a snap back into
reality to mimic waking up. Even though we used very few words as introduction to the
video, the correct word choice and literacy on part of everyone participating allowed for
us to have a seamless transition into a new mode of communication.

My personal literacy narrative is filled with realizations of the true impacts and
power of language and word choice and not only how but where it affects me everyday.
These two examples are highlights of memorable moments with literacy that I took as
eye opening experiences and helped me see what can be achieved with the appropriate
wording and language. Literacy goes beyond what we can just read and write, it
includes the understanding of what you are reading or writing, which allows you to
consciously create literature to meet your goals.