Blog # 2: Secondary School Literacy Experience

My secondary school literacy years were mostly negative. I honestly do not remember learning anything in those years. I remember two separate English classes; my teacher had read my essays out loud to the entire class. I remember the stories that I had written. I thought they were original and funny when I had written them. Initially, I thought that is why she was reading it and why the students were laughing but another student said that they were laughing at the mistakes. I remember feeling embarrassed because I had made mistakes. She never corrected my mistakes nor told me what I did wrong, so I never learned anything. Instead, I felt like I did not belong in that class; I did not like writing and I tried to avoid having to write anything. I wish if my teacher had given me better feedback to help me improve my writing. I believe this also negatively impacted my reading; I would take longer to read books because of my limited vocabulary and so I avoided reading as well.

In secondary school, we read a couple well-known books, but I could not relate to the stories either because I had not lived in that time period or because I had not experienced enough in life. One book that I did relate to was V.S. Naipaul’s “Miguel Street”. I believe it was because his characters were ‘everyday’ characters, so I was more able to visualize what he had written.

I will use these experiences to make my classroom a place where literacy is good by: (i) giving my students a choice in what they want to read or at least making sure that they could relate to what they are reading; (ii) making sure that they have or can access the books; (iii) making sure that the books help them to improve their vocabulary skills or find ways to inspire them to learn new words each day; (iv) encouraging them to just write – first having them write their ideas (ignoring the grammar and spelling mistakes), then providing constructive feedback – helping them fine-tune their ideas and create a draft –basically make it more interactive with continuous revising, commenting, and updating. I will have them use Google Doc to share the document with myself so that I can read, comment, or suggest edits while they work on it; and (v) I will set aside time for them to read and write.

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