Rags to Reading: My Journey with Literacy

            I think most people can’t remember a moment when they couldn’t read; as if it were a natural instinct they were born with. Reading for some is as easy as blinking, or breathing, or mindlessly indulging in junk food. All jokes aside, I for one can remember clear as day a time where I didn’t know how to read. It was first grade, and I was in Ms. Salmon’s class. She was your typical old white elementary school teacher. She had long grey hair and wore fun printed blouses and slacks. Like most elementary teachers she spoke with energy and made the class feel lively and really wanted to make her students love and enjoy what she taught. Jason in the first grade was easily distracted though, and for some reason, just couldn’t focus in class.

I remember Ms. Salmon’s spelling tests. We would have a word sort we worked on in class and had to study. Come the day of the test, we would have mini chalkboards with a sock we brought in from home which would hold our pieces of chalk and act as an eraser. She would call out each word and give us about a minute or so to spell it out on our chalkboard. She would come around and check our spelling, marking whether it was correct or not in her gradebook. The words I would write out would mostly be correct but I did not know what I was writing. It was like remembering to draw a picture with these words. I had no association with how each letter sounded. I simply just drew what I remembered the word to look like. This is how I got through first grade.

Come second grade, I had a hard time following along with my new teacher, Mrs. Mongiello. She was probably one of the worst teachers I have ever had because she prided her students who excelled, but as for second grade Jason who couldn’t read, she grew frustrated. One could describe her as irate in relation to me. She would not take the time to sit with me or offer any assistance. It felt like I was on my own. I would always be looking at my friend Delilah’s homework right before class copying as much as I could because I couldn’t read what I had to do. My teacher eventually caught on and took action. I had gone into a school program where I would be taken out of class to learn how to read one-on-one with a specialist who deals with struggling readers. I started to get a grasp on the language and the figures that once were just drawings became meaningful words that enabled me to become an active reader. The process was gradual, which meant I had to retake my second grade year to fulfill the credits and take the standardized test at the time, the Terra Nova.

You’re probably thinking, “What about your home life Jason? Didn’t someone help you while you were struggling?” The sad answer is no. I have two older sisters who were in high school while I was in primary school and my mother at the time was heavily medicated on antidepressants. My sisters would try to help, but they were too caught up in their own lives to be much help. My mother also made the occasional attempt, but to no avail she would grow drowsy and have to tell me to try again on me own or to ask my teacher or classmates for help.

I definitely see myself as someone who exhibits the resilience cycle. Despite unfortunate circumstances, I understood that I needed to further develop my academic skills in order to be successful. Throughout my middle and high school years is where I completely shifted gears and started to push myself into being a smarter and more well-read student. This wasn’t just my own doing though. One of my biggest supporters and allies was my Aunt Erica’s boyfriend Carlos. He took to me quickly when they started dated and I saw him almost as a father figure since my own dad wasn’t involved in my life. My mom and dad are split up, and my dad lives in the basement of my grandmother’s apartment building. Carlos though is a smart man and he would tutor me at my grandmother’s house when he would visit my aunt. It felt great knowing someone believed in me and my potential to succeed. When reading, I remember he would tell me to look for context clues and read with a pencil in my hand to mark up the text to better understand and dissect it. If something didn’t make sense, he would tell me to read it out loud and listen to the way the text wants to naturally be inflected as if it were spoken dialogue. That is one of the main ways I began to develop my literate ear. Words on a piece of paper are nothing unless you know what they are supposed to sound like.

In high school I took AP Literature and Composition, as well as AP Language and Composition. The language course was the more difficult of the two, but I passed my literature test with a 3 out of 4, proving that I understood the content of literature more than the complex language and its arsenal of rules and megalithic words. I think I was a pretty well-read student for only being in high school. I was also involved in the theatre department and had the chance to read complex works such as Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. The structure and form of this play is complex and will deal with two moments of time simultaneously. For example, the main protagonist Alan Strang would be talking to a therapist in the present while being involved physically in moments of the past. An average reader would probably be confused at this style and it was strange and interesting to have read this play for my AP Literature class.

I believe that to this day I’m still a literate person. Literacy is something that needs to develop personally. For some, it needs to be a hands on experience where we have someone coaching us through and we then get to take that coaching and make a practice session out of it where it is being applied consistently and effectively. I have to use literacy in the most abstract of ways. I need it in order to understand my college texts and pass my courses. I even need it in order to understand and learn my music. While music is a whole other language on its own, it can be read and listened to no differently than text. Music that is constructed with “standard” harmony and structure has a sense of breath and contains almost conversational inflections that make certain passages sound poetic and like a dialogue. As a future educator, I want to take this level of literacy and transfer it to my own students so that they can be literate in both their books and in the craft of music. Literacy is a life skill we all need in order to be successful and well versed in our crafts and disciplines. To this day I still continue to further my skills and there is never a moment where I feel like I have reached “maximum potential”. Growth is infinite.