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Joseph Mottola Professor Jane Rieman English 1101 September 19, 2012

The Truth of Reading and Writing between the Lines

At the age of three, my parents decided that it was time for their toddler to write his first word, Joseph. Although ineligible for an adult to read the writing, as if reading a foreign language, it was pure perfection in the eyes of a toddler who wanted to engage in everything and follow in the footsteps of his mother and father. After learning to write the few letters my parents taught me before starting kindergarten, learning to read was the next best thing that could happen. Although reading books for me did not start until kindergarten, as a toddler I would ask all of my family members to read everything to me whether it was a book or a sign on the road. My family would answer to my request and read the things I wanted them to. This prepared me for the joys of reading independently. As a child your imagination is very strong and when I began to read books it was as if the book would come to life and I was one of the characters in the story. I usually read the books that my teacher would send home with me, but when she sent home one of the books from the series of Biscuit, I was ready to read for three hours rather than the required thirty. Being able to transport myself in to the story made reading a hobby for me as a young child and it would make going to the library very amusing. The library has such a wide collection of books and I remember wanting to check out every book I picked up. I remember being excited to get my

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first library card because I felt like I was being given a pass into another world that I could escape into. As a young child, I was able to engage in a book without having to worry about writing a three page essay or answer comprehension questions that did no justification of what I knew once so ever. I believe that this is why, nowadays, I dont engage in books like I use to and I have no desire to read anymore. Little did I see that learning to read and write would come with profound memories that would teach me about myself and about the world that I live in! Kindergarten began my long journey of learning complex words, sentence structures, and grammar rules to create a series of paragraphs that would later become my college essays. I remember being excited to go school so that I could practice learning to read and write. One thing that would excite me about school in kindergarten was going into class and my teacher, Mrs. Andrews, would have a booklet of the letter that we were going to be learning that week ready for us to explore. Even though I knew some letters by the time kindergarten hit, I felt like these practice books gave me an opportunity to broaden my reading and writing horizons. The first quarter of kindergarten was hard for me because I was not grasping reading and writing like all the other children were. Although I knew some letters and some words, my teacher was still highly concerned and decided that it was best to meet with my parents. In doing so my parents, grandma, and Mrs. Andrews pushed me a lot to practice my reading and writing so that I could be prepared for the first grade and its endeavors with reading and writing. After having to practice so much, by the second six weeks of kindergarten, I had grasped reading and writing successfully and Mrs. Andrews put

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on my progress report above that I was reading very well and writing numbers and words in a variety of ways. Kindergarten was also when I was assigned my first writing project. My class had read a book called Flat Stanly by Jeff Brown and my teacher, Mrs. Andrews, decided to base our lesson for the week on the main character in the book, Flat Stanley. She decided to give us our own Flat Stanley and we had to send him away on a vacation. Our duty was to write a formal letter to a family member about our Flat Stanley and then we had to send the letter, along with Flat Stanley, away for his week-long vacation. It was then up to our family members to write about everything Flat Stanley did and to send him back along with a letter talking about his new experiences. I sent my Flat Stanley to aunt in Texas. I was anxious to get him back and read about the journey he had. I remember coming home from school one day and he arrived back to me and with him was a letter. When I opened the letter, it was like opening a Christmas present. I was so intrigued with the letters and words. I read the letter aloud to my grandma and I remember her helping me sound out some hard words that I could not pronounce. Doing this project opened one of the many doors of writing for me and I learned the joy of composing letters which I still hold to this day. Also, this project showed how my family helped to improve my literacy skills. In the third grade my class had paired up with a kindergarten class to take part in the reading buddy program. I remember being excited and nervous at the same time to take part in this program. I was new born reader how to would be able to teach techniques on how to to a mini me, meaning nervous because I had to teach a read and I was excited because I someone my skills and read. I remember being assigned Joey was his name. When I first

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meet him and sat him down to read, he struggled to get from one word to another and to read a full sentence without asking for help. Then and there, I saw I had my work cut out for me and my goal was to have this child to be reading by the time the reading buddy program expired. So we met our reading buddies every Wednesday to help them learn the value of reading. I decided the best book to read was Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault which is an alphabet book about the letters in the alphabet told in a rhyme. In my struggles of reading, this book helped me to be able to move on to a wider variety of readings. This book was the base of my success in reading. I made a decision to read this book to Joey and doing so this book became one of Joeys favorite reads. Every time we met up on Wednesday to practice reading, he would want to read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and so we did. By the middle of the semester, Joey would walk into the classroom and want to read to me. After the reading buddy program was over Joey and I both learned something; he learned to read and I learned that I was a pretty good teacher. With this experience, I was proud of myself because I had taught someone one of the most important and challenging concepts needed in everyday life and that was to read. This program was very helpful to me and my reading buddy and the school was one hundred percent for it. When I was in the fourth and fifth grade, my school required everybody from the first grade on up to participate in a program called, The AR reading program. The

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was this program was set up was that it required students to read books and then take a quiz on it. With the quiz, it determined how well you comprehended the book and each time you gained or lost points depending on how well or bad you did on the quiz. At certain stages in the growing points, you were recognized on the morning announcements and honored by receiving a shiny pin that would tell how good of a reader you were. The AR program motivated me to read more so that I could gain lots of points on the quizzes and earn that shiny pin that I worked so hard for. Also when I was in the fourth and fifth grade I was given the position by the head librarian to be one of the many student library assistants. Engaging in my new position, I had learned how to use the Dewey decimal system and how to check out books. Being around books all the time gave me a lot of motivation to read. Putting the books away on the shelf, I would always want to read the summaries on the back of each book and see if it interested me or not. Doing this I would get carried away from what I was supposed to be doing and once I caught myself in the act I noticed myself walking to the library checkout table with the maximum number of books you could check out ready to take home to explore! Once I got into middle school, English became a little more difficult, but that did not stop me from wanting to engage myself in learning the next level of my journey in English. My seventh and eighth grade years hosted some of the most memorable moments of my English career. One very memorable moment I had was in the seventh grade when my English teacher, Ms. Swiger, assigned the class to take on putting together a Mr. Potato head fashion show. The assignment was to dress a Mr. Potato head figurine

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up and write a descriptive paragraph about the way he looks. For example one line from my script went, Fluffys pretty pink nose was made up by no other than Rudolph the red nose reindeer. We had to recite our paragraph to the class as if we were reading a script in a fashion show. I enjoyed this assignment because I had to write while using my five senses: smell, touch, taste, sight, and sound to capture my audiences attention. The fashion show assignment taught me a lot about using detail when I write. When writing a paper, I always refer to what I learned from Mr. Potato head walking down the runway in his hot pink woven basket designed by Bugs Bunny. After my exciting experiences in the seventh grade, it was then off to the eighth grade and English became one of my favorite subjects. Eighth grade started off with excitement due to it being my last year in middle school. During this course of a year, my English teacher, Mrs. Hentz, played an important role in my life. Not only was she enthusiastic about teaching English, she was also a very interesting women. I wish I could be writing her literacy memoir due to all the countries she taught English in. But back to my memoir, you could tell Mrs. Hentz enjoyed writing and thats not because she was an author of her own book. I remember her telling the class she wrote her own book and my classmate and I decided that we were going to try and write and publish our own book, which turned out to be a failure due to the fact we were thirteen and couldnt decide on a strict story line. This book was just a fun project that we did on our

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free time! We never told her about it. It was the second week of school when Mrs. Hentz introduced our year-long project and that was writing our own autobiography. With this project, I got a chance to recall old memories from when I was younger, talk about where I came from, and talk about my future goals. Researching myself motivated me to want to write more because it gave me a chance to see who I was and how I became Joseph Denis Mottola. When I look back at my autobiography, it makes me laugh because my writing is so much more different now than it was four years ago. Its as if my writing matured while I began to mature. In the same year, another incident took place that would change my thought process of the different ways people speak. I remember sitting in my math class going over the previous nights homework and my math teacher, Mr. Lambrix, was trying to explain a problem by using potatoes as an example. Mr. Lambrix was from the west, so the way he said potato was different from the way this girl, Lindsey Walker, a fellow classmate, had pronounced it. She told him he was pronouncing it wrong and tried to tell him the correct way to say. Mr. Lambrix was not too pleased and replied You may say potato but I say potato (spoken with a long a.) Everyone was taught a different way to pronounce words because everyone is not from the same origin. With this incident, I realized that people speak different ways and I should not judge the way one person says something because they might have not been taught to say it the same way I was. I came to realization that I shouldnt talk about the way other people talk because we all speak differently. Although I was an outsider on the incident, this experience relates to the concepts explored in Linda Christensens essay on Teaching Standard English: Whose Standard? In her essay, Christensen stated Over the years my English teachers pointed out all of my errors- the usage errors I inherited from my mothers Bandon, Oregon, dialect, the spelling errors I overlooked, the fancy words I used incorrectly. (103) This quote shows that people all come

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from a different place and learn a different dialect. My encounter is an example of this quote displayed in a math class from a student to a teacher rather than in an English class from a teacher to a student. No matter what the situation or who you are, people are going to pick out others flaws and try to tell them the correct way to speak. No one should be judged on the way the talk or write because that is who they are. People should be able to use the dialect they feel most comfortable with in a conversation or in a paper. No one is perfect and no one speaks perfect English. What is perfect English? After attending three years of middle school, it was time for me to begin a new chapter in my life. High school began and the writing and reading materials required to graduate high school became more in depth and complex. Writing papers had to be written in a certain format or they were not accepted and the books that were assigned I was not interested in. I remember in my junior year of high school, I was required to read a book called The Sound of the Fury by William Faulkner , which I could not tell you what it was about because I did not and would never read this book. I tried to read the first ten pages of it but I did not comprehend one thing it was saying and it seemed as if it was written in the stone ages. Another incident that took place in my junior year was when my teacher, Mrs. Zavanut, was a Hitler at grading papers. She did not have one positive comment to put on anyones papers. Its as if she saw the paper as a chance to chop it up into shreds and make her students look like complete morons. One paper in particular, I had spelled something wrong which of course is a common error in a lot of papers. My teacher, Mrs. Zvanut, decided it would be appropriate to underline the word and put this is how you spell it, duh! Receiving this kind of degrading comment on one simple paper, especially from a teacher, really upset me and made me drop out of her AP English III class.

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During high school I decided to take Spanish both because I wanted to learn a new language and because I was required to participate in two semesters of the same language in order to graduate high school. I chose Spanish over the other languages because the culture interests me and in the long run could help me, due to the fact that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States. I enjoyed learning Spanish so much that I took an extra Spanish class in high school which was not required. Learning to read, write, and speak a new language was very fun and it also took a lot of time and dedication to know what I was saying, writing and comprehending. Learning Spanish made me want to read and write more Spanish because I was challenging myself to read and write in a whole other language that was not my own. Spanish has a lot of different grammar rules and sentence structures from English and you have to conjugate words with the correct endings. Now for a quick Spanish lesson: in English if you were going to say, I go, in Spanish you would take the verb, ver, which means, to go, and then conjugate it with the correct ending which would turn out to be, voy, meaning, I go, in Spanish. At first I thought learning Spanish was going to be difficult but it turned out to be very easy for me and I really enjoyed learning it. In my Spanish one class my teacher would give us stories to read in Spanish that we would have to translate into English. I enjoyed this because

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it gave me the chance to practice reading and comprehending a story in another language. Learning to read and write in Spanish has motivated me by having a goal, which is to read a whole chapter book in Spanish in the next year. Learning to read and write Spanish in high school has actually inspired me to take up Spanish as minor in college. Throughout my life I have had many memorable moments throughout my literacy career. Everything that I have experienced with reading and writing has shaped me one way or another and has helped me get to the point I am in life now. Without those horrible comments from my English teachers or those fun and interesting reading and writing projects, I would not be the reader or writer I am to this day. I am glad that I have had a chance to be able to write a literacy memoir because some people in the world do not get the chance to learn how to read or write. I am more than happy to have been given the chance to be able to express my feelings through writing and to be able to learn to read.

Works Cited Christensen, Linda M. "Teaching Standard English: Whose Standard?" Essays on Writing. Eds. Lizbeth Bryant and Heather Clark. New York: Longman, 2008. 101-109.

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