Paper 1 - Literacy Autobiography

Introduction

Perhaps an odd and unfitting starting point, it differs greatly from the theme of this blog. It was about

my early troubles I had reading, as well as what I feel are the definitive highlights of my writing skills

and what embodied me as a writer. What follows is my paper – it gives you an insight into my
beginnings, and how I used to write things when I was a kid.

These small moments - no matter how insignificant - were still a vital gear in the machine that has

shaped my writing to be what it is today. Without this “history” my writing looses the essence of what

it is and ceases to have coherence, but instead becomes a disorganized collection of thoughts and ideas with no screws to hold them together.

It took me a while to think of what to write for this paper, mostly because I hadn't actually thought back to those times in a long time, I sorta kept it away in a deep place where I wouldn't necessarily forget it, but I wouldn't really remember it either.

Literacy Autobiography:

I remember one of my early writing experiences as a kid. I think I was in first grade, when my

teacher asked us to write about our favorite think to do and why. I wrote about how I loved to swim

underwater because it made me feel like I was flying. I have had various experiences throughout my

life of reading and writing.

One of the worse experiences I had was around the time I was in third grade. I had been praised by many of my teachers for how I read – my current teacher considered me to be at the fifth grade level, and she wanted me to show off my skills to another class. She brought me in front of a class of fourth graders to read aloud to all of them. Throughout first and second grade I took some speech classes because I had trouble pronouncing my F's and V's. I had finished the class and was fine at the time, but as soon as I started reading aloud I started to get nervous. At first I was fine, but as I continued to read I got more nervous, until I noticed that I was mispronouncing some of my words, particularly the words with F's in them.

Eventually I got so nervous that I froze completely. Needless to say, it was not a good day.

I had one of my better experiences in writing during the sixth grade, with the teacher I had then,

Mr. Felician. He was a tall, chubby, black man who loved to make people have fun, and it was

completely different from any other english class I'd ever taken. All the others were about grammar,

summaries and writing about writers and books, etc. and never interested me. His class, however, was different. He had us write about what interested us. It was the first time I'd ever been actually engaged by writing something, and I felt accomplished doing the assignments I was given (and thought of), instead of feeling like what I did was just fodder. I felt a lot better about writing until the next year

when it went back to the same old stuff again, just at a more advanced level.

Another experience I had was actually pretty recent, it was my last year of high school. I was in honors english, and instead of doing my normal wait-till-the-end then hand in crap that I threw together just by using intelligent words, I had actually decided to do the assignment as soon as I got it, and write as intricately and as deep as I could about the subject. I don't remember specifics about the paper, I think it was about analyzing religious paintings of angels and demons and stuff like that to try and figure out what the artists were signifying with them (it was about 14 pages I think). It ended up being one of the most cohesive and well written papers I ever wrote, and one that I was actually proud of.