Week 10: Nov 3, 5

My Literacy Autobiography

To begin this story of literacy, I could recall my childhood experiences with reading: my parents reading me Robert Munch, the first time I read a story by myself, my love of the Little House on the Prairie series, my personal identification with the character Matilda, my teachers scolding me for reading too quickly in class, or my climb up the Accelerated Reader ladder.  But I will not.  For despite my early love of reading, I began to despise it as I entered junior high, my adolescence.  Suddenly the thing which brought me joy was a source of ridicule.  Junior high was not about doing well in school or defining myself as an individual; it was about fitting in and attempting to be someone I was not.  I would imagine most people have had a similar experience.  So I abandoned my love of reading; I told myself it was not who I really was, and I began looking for someone else.

High school offered me the opportunity to be myself again.  For some strange reason, being in band and in UIL Literary Criticism were socially acceptable.  Although I had some amazing experiences in Literary Criticism, the event which redefined my personal literacy and pushed me towards a future in English was my senior AP English class.  Mr. Reeves, my teacher, taught literature in a way my previous teachers had not.  On the first day of class, he walked in, and the first thing he said was, “I hate Moby Dick.”  He then proceeded, in the voice of a stuffy, older female English teacher, to demonstrate the plot chart of Moby Dick. He started at one end of the white board, drawing a straight line and saying, “whale blubber, whale blubber, whale blubber, whale blubber.”  Then drawing a large upward spike, “everybody dies,” and back down to the straight line, “whale blubber, whale blubber, whale blubber.”  I could not believe my teacher was criticizing a work like Moby Dick, but found myself excited to have a teacher who was willing to actually give us his opinions, especially an unfavorable opinion about such an important piece of literature.  (I must confess that I had not then, nor have I now read Moby Dick, so I do not know if Mr. Reeve’s plot chart was accurate.  But I have read Redburn and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and very much enjoyed those works.)  Over the course of the year, Mr. Reeves never presented a work as “great” or “important;” he simply wanted us to read and decide for ourselves.  Additionally, Mr. Reeves was the first teacher I had that strayed outside the cannon and allowed us to read works that challenged both our personal and academic maturity.  The works I can recall from that year were: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Frankenstein, Chang and Eng, The World According to Garp, Paradise Lost, To His Coy Mistress, Hamlet, The End of the Affair, The Collector, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Additionally, Mr. Reeves gave us an introduction to literary theory.  We read To His Coy Mistress over and over again, applying a different reading each time and examining the different results.  While it was a very basic introduction, it gave me a strong footing for starting college level work.

Some of these works certainly challenged my basic reading skills; I remember sitting in a coffee shop during my free period, reading Milton line by line.  I could not believe Mr. Reeves was putting us through such torture.  But I felt such a sense of accomplishment after reading and understanding even just a paragraph.  Three years later, reading Milton in college, I was not only more prepared to read Paradise Lost, but was genuinely excited about it.  Most importantly, Mr. Reeves taught me to read differently.  Before his class, I seemed required only to determine if a work was “good” or “bad,” if I liked it or disliked it.  However, two works in particular from his class taught me that things were not so simple.  I felt a strong connection to Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Not only did I love the style and the story, but I personally identified with the book’s struggle with Catholicism.  The ending of the novel, however, is quite weak.  I wanted to overlook this and just say it was a fantastic book, but Mr. Reeves would not allow it.  He said I had to acknowledge the effect of the ending of the rest of the novel, despite how much I liked it.  He taught me to identify and acknowledge the weaknesses in a novel, to question the authority of the author, and to admit that I could find value in a novel despite its weakness.  Similarly, I have to admit that I despised Tess of the d’Urbervilles while I was reading it.  When it came time to take the AP test that year, I thought I could easily avoid writing about it with Hamlet and Milton in my repertoire.  But alas, the prompt pointed to Tess, and I had no choice but to write about it.  I was forced to acknowledge the value and the effectiveness of a book I loathed.  I began to understand that my personal feelings about a book did not necessarily reflect its value.  It was a difficult, but necessary and valuable lesson.

Finally, Mr. Reeves unintentionally pushed me into becoming an English major.  Not only did he write my college recommendation letter, but he found an English department scholarship at Tech which was only awarded to students from my high school.  I applied and received the scholarship.  At the time, I was still unsure about what I should major in, but decided that a department who would give me a scholarship as a freshman seemed like as good of a department as any.  I had been leaning towards English, but the scholarship made the decision for me.  Despite its practical beginning, it became obvious by the end of my first semester that English was the right place for me.  I changed minors several times, but always knew that I was in the right major, in the right field.  Although I am unsure of my eventual career path, I still feel that I am in the right place.  So thank you Mr. Reeves, for showing me that place.                  

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