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Sneha Ameya

Professor Aleashia Walton

Honors English 2089

10 June, 2018

A Series of Literary Events: The Sanctimonious Sponsor

For me, a literary sponsor is not only someone who influences what you read and write

but also someone who influences how you read and write. In a broader sense, the literary

sponsors you rely on at an earlier age, have the potential to shape your personality and belief

system as an adult. Through my experiences growing up in a small suburban town off Cincinnati,

I’ve learned that the smaller, more personal literary sponsors have left a more long-term impact

on me and my belief system. Whereas larger, more mainstream literary sponsors, although

having a giant clutch on my education during monumental chunks of my life, have only left

short-term or adjustable impact on me and my belief system. This is especially important to

distinguish when considering how the literary sponsors that I interacted with at a young age have

helped me evolve into the person I am today.

One of the first people who shaped my literacy were my parents, who for most of my

childhood raised me with strict rules that they thought would encourage a balanced life. Some of

these rules included “only two TV Shows per day” and “always follow the serving sizes on snack

boxes” and “if you help with laundry you get a quarter” (Which I, being very young, thought was

striking it rich). My mom also loved to break down my days into ‘Story Time” and “Workbook

Time” and “Lunch Time” which I would follow with increasing fervor.

My mom had a gift of making everything we did, no matter how frivolous or time-

consuming, feel worth it and necessary in my day. She made struggling through A Very Hungry
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Caterpillar on my own seem thrilling and exciting. And if there was something I didn’t want to

do, like the reading comprehension or math from the Workbooks she bought me, she’d always

promise to do something more fun after I was done with them. We even co-wrote a children’s

book together about farm animals. I would tell her the story I wanted to create for the animals in

my farm and she would simplify it and write it down on construction paper. Then we’d take turns

finding pictures in magazines that we could cut up and use to fill our pages.

I was 5 years old.

When I started grade school I was reading Junie B. Jones and Ready Freddy and Magic

Tree House. There was something about a series that was so enticing to me back then; It meant a

never-ending world that I could delve myself into over and over again without the consequence

of having to say goodbye to my favorite flat characters. That, coupled with the fact that my

parents, although having moved and settled in America almost 8 or 9 years earlier, hadn’t really

made that many friends. Which, in turn, meant that I too was very vacant in the friend

department.

The few friends I did have would always ask me, with the slightest hint of jealousy, how

I wasn’t put off by all those pages and books. I never really had a good answer for them (seeing

how “don’t lie” was another one of my mother’s many rules to live a balanced life), except that I

didn’t find them all that much work to read. It was almost as if the months of Camp MOM, Pre-

Preschool had actually taught me something more than to only eat one piece of candy every day.

This proved to be somewhat of a concern for me back then because not only was reading

considered “uncool” by the most popular children in my class but it also instantly labeled me as

the Class Nerd (It’s important to note, here, that the term “Class Nerd” in this context is used not

as the very cool Big Bang Theory definition of the term but as the very uncool 90’s Chandler
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Bing definition of the term. Which is loosely equivalent to the difference between a playful

punch in the arm and a sharp knife to your back).

So my reading days began to dwindle. Like Sherman Alexie in his article “Superman and

Me”, I was brought up to enjoy and cherish books but the people around me were telling me that

I shouldn’t. Unfortunately, unlike Alexie, “I was [not] smart. I was [not] arrogant. I was [very

un]lucky” (Alexie 7.1). Because for a majority of my second-grade year I refused to pick up a

book at all, no less a series. I lived in fear of that dreadful word: the word that would send me

careening off to my mother in tears. For an entire year I became one of those “defeated Indian

kids who sit in the back rows and ignore [learning] with theatrical precision” (Alexie 8.12-13).

And all for what? Because I valued the acknowledgment of the strangers around me? No. The

real reason was because, in the short period of time between my mom teaching me everything I

knew to me starting school for the first time, the role of the literary sponsor had switched hands

from my mother to my potential friends. This evolution from a small literary sponsor to a more

lucid and widespread one, not only forced me to question my original assumption of what

reading should be like, but, it also shook the very foundation in which I had grown up on for the

first 7 years of my life.

My gap year from reading, as much as I hate to endorse it, did end up helping me make

friends. But it also went against another one of my mom’s infamous rules for a balanced life: “be

honest with yourself”. Thankfully, however, by the time I hit fourth grade, another, more

powerful literary sponsor captured the heart of not only myself but everyone else in my class as

well, turning reading into a popular and competitive sport equivalent to that of college football.

Because fourth grade was the year my school district implemented AR Points. For those

unfamiliar with this program, it’s basically a glorified series of tests that you can take online at
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your own convenience testing you on your knowledge of the books that you’ve recently finished.

Every time you pass a test on a book, you rack up a certain amount of AR Points depending on

the difficulty and length of the novel. The questions were laughably easy so that’s not what

created the social competition to read. In fact, It was the giant graph at the front of the class

cataloguing how many books everyone had read since the beginning of the school year.

Now, as if someone had flipped a switch in everyone’s brains, reading was cool again.

Like Deborah Brandt points out in her article “Sponsors of Literacy”, “literacy as a resource

becomes available to ordinary people largely through the mediations of more powerful sponsors”

(Brandt 16.1-2). And in my case, my school had become the most powerful sponsor I, or anyone

else for that matter, had encountered with at the time. Which Brandt also mentions has the

potential to both “enable and hinder [our] literary activity” (Brandt 27.4).

Everyone’s new-found yearning to read, although enabling us to tuck a bunch of books

under our belt in a very short amount of time, also hindered us from reading for our own

cherishment. Because behind the system there was an unspoken voice that constantly coaxed us

to always try to one-up each other. We weren’t reading out of the kindness of our hearts. We

were reading to be better than Alex 2 who always sat in the back picking his nose (if you do

worse than that guy it’s just sad), to know more than Raj who sat up front like the Brainiac he

was (you should thrive to be smarter than him), or to be more of a know-it-all than Samantha

whose hand shot up faster than the teacher could ask a question (why aren’t you as fast with

information as her?).

It was unhealthy. But that’s the system we were dealt with by our new more powerful

literary sponsor.
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In the end, I’ve realized that there’s been three major literary sponsors that have shaped

my personality today and I experienced all of them to various degrees in the first decade of my

life: My mom, my friends, and my school. These dramatic evolutionary changes in my education

at such a young age is why I’m still so self-conscious of what people think of me in the academic

sense. Why I’m always on guard and defensive when someone questions my knowledge on a

subject. Why I always tend to seek the approval of my teachers regardless of whether or not I

believe in and understand what they’re saying. Why even in design school, where individuality

and creativity of ideas are so important, I try to one-up the people around me by unconsciously

integrating the best parts of their projects into my own. My brain has been hardwired since a very

young age to think in only a competitive way and it still hinders my creative problem-solving

skills to this day.

The only consolation I have is that, although my friends and my school system’s

competitive attitude have been the majority shareholders of my learning over the years of

Elementary, Middle, and High school, the only sponsor whose information I can’t unlearn is the

information my Mom provided me in the very beginning, before a bigger literary sponsor took a

hold of my life. She not only taught me how to enjoy reading and writing in a social and

academic context, but she also taught me how to embrace the learning process no matter how

difficult the content gets. And even though it might seem like the information my friends and my

school slowly fed to me all those years is piling up and smothering the rules my mom originally

taught me to lead a more balanced life, there’s always a way to throw out the junk mail and hold

onto what’s important in the end.

It will take some time, but it is possible for me to evolve away from beliefs that hinder

how I interact and work with other people today. I have more control in what I learn and gain
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from an experience than I think I do. I just need to take the time to reflect on what information I

should keep and what information I should work to flush out of my mind.
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Work Cited

Alexie, Sherman. “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me.” The Most Wonderful

Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading. Minneapolis: Milkweed

Editions, 1997. 3-6. Print.

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 49.2

(1998): 165-85. Print.