Academic Family, Childhood Bilingualism
Anonymous (2009-03-19)
>>INTERVIEWER:  Alright, did you want to just start off by telling us your name, if you wish to share it, and where you are coming from?

>>ANONYMOUS: I don't want to put my name in it. 

>>INTERVIEWER:  Okay, then don't tell us your name. How about, what are some of your earliest memories of reading and writing that stand out to you.

>>ANONYMOUS: Okay, sure. I think there are two. One of them is my earliest memory of reading when I was in the car with my parents driving through my home town. I had the sudden awareness that I could read signs, particularly signs of – I don't know, I think it was maybe McDonald's or a sign of some fast food place or just a store. The recognition that I was reading somehow rather than – that was my earliest memory; I have no idea what age that was. 
>>ANONYMOUS: When I was five years old I was fluent in Dutch and so when I came back - my family lived in Holland for two years – when I came back to the States I started in first grade. Unbeknownst to my parents, I tested into the lowest reading group because I was fluent in the Dutch alphabet and sound system and not the English one. My parents didn't know this for six months, something like that, until I started to come home and say that I was in the reading group with all the dumb kids. So they kind of wondered what was going on and checked into it. I mean, I think back in the – this would have been – the early eighties, literacy testing, I think, for early elementary literacy testing was not so aware, possible of the diversity of backgrounds that students might be bring into the classroom. So I remember my father teaching me to read in English with Dr. Seuss books. 

>>INTERVIEWER:   Oh, okay. Cool. Something that interests me: do you have any memories of technology as it relates to your writing? Like a moment where you experienced a technological shift in writing and that affected how you thought about it?

>>ANONYMOUS: Well the switch to word processing happened when I was in junior high, which would have been the mid-eighties, mid- to late-eighties. I remember making the choice to not write my essays out by hand, but to compose them all on the computer. It was a conscious choice. I was somewhere between, I guess, eleven and thirteen, something like that. It was a relief; I have terrible handwriting and so it was sort of a liberation. 

>>INTERVIEWER: I hear you. 

>>ANONYMOUS: So. 

>>INTERVIEWER: So do you have any other sort of stories that come to mind when you think about literacy in your life, life what is the first thing that popped into your head?

>>ANONYMOUS: Well the thing about literacy, a little more broadly, conceived beyond just sort of learning to read and write and those technologies: recently I have been reflecting on the fact that my great grandmother had a PhD. My father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather all had PhDs. and were academics. Amazingly, it has taken me being almost completed with a PhD. program myself, to really realize how significant that is and how much that has shaped my life in the sense, also, that I resisted it for a long time. I resisted the academic life; I took a tour through a professional life before I came back. So, I have been reflecting recently on what is the meaning of that and what are the literacies that are part of my own makeup, that I have taken for granted?  

>>INTERVIEWER: Well, is there anything else? We often keep these pretty short so it is okay. 

>>ANONYMOUS: Sure, sure, sure. I guess those are things that come to mind so – 

[Both Laugh]

>>INTERVIEWER: Alright, well we will go ahead and –