What is literacy?

When asked the first day of class, "What is literacy?" I immediately thought someone who can read and write.

Throughout the course of the class, I've learned that literacy is much more.

Literacy to me now, is knowing much about a certain subject, or being able to understand a subject.

One could be technologically literate, athletically literate, and so on.

I feel like your everyday person would only picture literacy as a learned person- someone who could read and write. But there is so much more to literacy.

Is there text in class? in school? in life?

Yes!
Text is everywhere. From the first day of class syllabus to the final exam, we are receiving text. I read about 50 pages a night for my classes, and I know i'm not the only one. We are constantly asked to read something, analyze something, interpret something from text. They are called textbooks for a reason; they are filled with text. Sometimes tiny, frustrating text. Not only do we absorb text in the classroom and at school, it is known that we are hit with thousands of advertisements everyday. A billboard, a brochure, a commercial, it's all text. I have still not even mentioned the obvious text we recieve in everyday life. Reading the news, whether in hand or online, we are still receiving text. Checking our Facebooks, Twitter, and emails, it's all text.

We are surrounded by text. It's everywhere we look, whether we actively notice it or not.

Multi-Modal Reflection

After watching multimodal essays in class on Thursday, I can see there is no "right" way to go about the project. I can appreciate an assignment with loose guidelines that allows the students ot be creative. It was fun brainstorming ideas with my group to try and come up with something that will be both interesting and fun.

We decided we wanted to have people in our project instead of just words, so we're doing a series of interviews with different generations of Lubbockites, asking "What is the one material thing you cannot live without?"

We hope to find some correlations between the item they choose and their generation, or at least see some similarities and differences and what people truly think they need.

Should be fun!

Are we tools or tool users?

I have thought long and hard about this, and still find it hard to come up with a deifnite answer. One the one hand, everyone wants to think and believe that they, themselves are a "tool". That without our special selves, the job, the bigger picture wouldn't be complete. That as a "tool" we are the thing that will get the job done. And while I think it is nice to think of ourselves as "tools", I've started to think that we are tool users.

Being a tool user makes us no less of an individual, or any less important, but I think it is more logical. We are the vessel to so speak, and we have absorbed all of the "tools" around us. Everything we experience or encounter plays into the bigger picture. We use everything from vocabulary to basic equations and manners, that we have learned throughout our lives and we use them as "tools" in our everyday lives.

What we learn and absorb are the tools we use to function!

Visual Literacy

I actually took a film class in the English department last semester, in which my instructor asked us to "read the films." We would watch a variety of films, and analyze them scene by scene. We would look at every angle, every expression, every movement, and through that come up with the meaning of the "text" which was the movie.

I never had thought of myself as "reading" while watching movies, or anything, but through that class I discovered that looking at something analytically and and deciphering the meaning makes one literate. My teacher was extremely literate in film, I however just broke the surface; but I can say that I now watch movies with a bit more critical eye.

I think it can be said that there is such a thing as visual literacy. It can be complex, to piece together sound and images, and put together all elements that make a movie, and "read" them for what they are meant to be.

Very Short Stories

Snow day, cable's out. Now what?

Washed it, dried it, shrunk it.

Bills are late, no shower today!

Politics Shmolitics

When I turned 18 I felt like such a grown up. I could buy lottery tickets, tobacco, and pornography, and I could vote. I did two out of the four, and voting was one of them. I voted in the 2008 Presidential election; though at the time I didn't really know anything about why I was voting.

I know that I am blessed to live in a country where we have the opportunity to vote for our leaders, but I think the reason someone votes and how they vote should be left up to them.

I don't really care for politics now, and I certainly didn't when I was 19. I voted for who my entire family was voting for. I'm not proud that I was uninformed, and that I cast a vote based on generations and generations of the same beliefs. But, I guess our values have to come from somewhere, right?

I cringe whenever I hear political debates, and being the "gray" person I am, like to remain neutral. As I've gotten older, i've realized the importance of listening to both sides of an issue, and deciding from that how to make your own ideas up about something.

Now I don't think there is anything wrong with staying true to your families' political beliefs when choosing a news source, or voting, but there must be something deeper that drives your political motivation.

For me, I hope i'm never a right-wing or left-wing nut job, but I do hope that in the next election I will be an informed citizen that casts a vote based on my values and beliefs, and the candidate I think will best run our country.