Experiences and Attitudes Key in Literacy Development, Literacy Comprehension

Through her interviews, Brandt attempts to gather different attitudes and experiences with both reading and writing a wide variety of people in order to discover, not "how people make meaning through reading and writing" but rather "how people make meaning of" them. (pg. 460) Thus, she studies the intricacies of various influencing factors in the learning process, not limited to home or school-based learning, in order to explore how they have acquired their roles in human lives.

I think Brandt summed up the results of her research best when she wrote: "It appears that what gives writing its particular value for people--its usefulness in maintaining material life, withholding experience for private reflection, and resisting conformity and control--are the very qualities that make writing a problematic practice for adults to pass on to children or for children to share easily with adults. Paradoxically, writing remains more invisible than reading, both because of how it is embedded in mundane, workaday concerns and because of how it is surrounded by privacy, secrecy, and suspicion. Consequently, parents and children have fewer ways of seeing, naming, and talking about writing than appears to be the case for reading." (page 473)

While she meandered and repeated her points far too often, she did reveal some interesting tidbits, such as this paradox in which reading and writing do not equate. It makes sense then to say that the reason it is easier to talk about making meaning through reading and writing rather than of is because such perspectives are passed on through traditional child-rearing and educational methods, and thus generationally reinforced to a great degree. Thus, literacy development focuses less on critical, interpretive writing skills, aside from the practicalities, and more on reading as a source of enjoyment and closeness between family members. In my eyes, the former results in personal pleasure, healing, or growth, while the latter provides insight into the previous results.

To be more specific, Brandt brought up a topic particularly interesting to me. She mentioned that the destruction of writing, such as journals and diaries containing personal information, only adds to the inequality of the two subjects. She argues that the sharing of writing validates its production and will help eliminate the paradox she appears to believe is negative and detrimental to the field of writing. By mentioning civil rights activism and otherwise, she seems to want to move the reader to express their emotions and feelings for social change, while still including various tales of the heartwarming connections people generally have forged with reading. She wants to incite positivity in writers, I think, or at least make writing less alienating than she sees it. In her eyes, and many others', written word is both a powerful tool and a source of enjoyment, and she seems to want people to become more aware of this duality so as to validate its place in our society and maintain readership with new-found reverence and respect for the craft she admires. By attempting to understand writing's place and power in our lives, Brandt seems to feel that partaking in this comprehensive study of how we learn can even give us a refreshing new outlook as readers. For the most part, I agree. We always need to step back and become cognizant of our actions and thoughts, and why should reading and writing be exempt? We don't only live through our actions and thoughts, but rather advance through our reevaluation of them and by making any changes we see fit.

My question: What do we think of Brandt's discussion on page 474 of a claim that in literary and expository writing, using "professional models...was actually a way of imposing elitist values and domesticating amateur, popular forms of writing that had flourished in earlier times...[as] a way to curtail or control writing, not necessarily to develop it"? Considering here writing's less positive, lonely, impractical, suspicious reputation...

"Did you ever read something and realize it was about you?"

This is the question I asked my roommate as I sat on my bed reading the Rodriguez article. Intrigued, she listened to my brief quotation and explanation of it but she only appeared perplexed. "Huh," she said and continued on her way out the door to work the night shift. "I'm gonna get the garbage. I'll see you tomorrow!"

I frowned and continued onward, engaged as ever, motivated to follow an intuition I learned quickly the two of us did not seem to share. I had the thought that we might, both of us coming from working class families, both be inspired to further our education and abandon the lifestyles of those at home we'd be taught to no longer desire, but I realized the fundamental divide really rested in our personalities and personal experiences. Like Rodriguez, and unlike my roommate, I had a number of factors encouraging me to continue pursuing education through the exploration of literature. Guided perhaps by teachers with a knack for grammar and a love of a good story, I found my desire becoming cultivated in their happy existences. I began to "imitate" their lives by doing the research and reading necessary to get one step closer to that happiness I perceived they had attained through such methods. Though I found inspiration, lessons, and insight in these pursuits, I hardly felt a tinge of happiness with each step I took down their paths. Eventually, I decided mostly unconsciously to throw away the high school newspaper editing team, the dreams of one day living in a city (I hate cities) and working for a publishing company, the aspiration of being a notable author attending conferences, all dreams and activities I was guided to partake in and enjoy, all because, as Rodriguez learned, I hardly had a sense of what I truly yearned for. I mistook glances into the windows of my future life as nostalgic glimpses at the past; but all I want is to tend the garden my parents started when I was a child and make it my own. These are all things I've known, I suppose, on some level, but connecting them in such a manner, as he has done, illuminated the tiny fibers holding together my life ladder that dangles down into the caverns of my hippocampus.

Veering away from the personal revelation, remembering I am still a full-time student and my garden is buried under two feet of snow, I'll move toward more theoretical matters. Rodriguez, as I have related, enters the conversation about the working class family child's confusing placement in the world of academia and his therefore confusing replacement back into the working class world of his parents. He ventures to prove that children like himself, like myself, struggle perhaps more than others born into a higher class with coming to terms with one's social orientation, caught between two very different lifestyles and dependent on the occurrence of  influencing factors. He explains all such arguments through detailed personal accounts in which he evaluates his thoughts/feelings in the past and as he grew in age and experience to the time of his writing the article.

I believe Rodriguez had some terribly good insight, terrible only in the stark truth that education, though necessary to reach a point of decisive happiness, can appear futile and lose its appeal at such a point as he reached in graduate school; and good, in the sense that life potentially will thereafter feel more fully lived once one enters their own path and starts walking. I find his argument valuable in my understanding of the education system at large as I consider that his brutal, hard to accept honesty brightens the field of composition theory by improving one's literacy of their personal history and that of the system they work within. I feel far more informed, thanks certainly due to Rodriguez, about the unconscious life that I hoped such study would produce -- and confident about pursuing my desires.

Finally, my question: Being that Rodriguez offers the notion that "the end of education" can be achieved through an arduous mental journey, the "experience [that] had allowed me to shape into desire what would have been only indefinite longings," ending feelings of guilt, sadness, and anxiety and providing a new more fulfilling sense of achievement... should we believe those occasional "scholarship boy" working class children are destined for such an outcome? Or are the two of us just a couple of far too self-aware exceptions?