A literacy story: Filmed by Anthony Frasca
Filkins, Scott

>>SCOTT: I really don't remember like a complete narrative of learning to read and write, I just have a couple of kind of discrete things that kind of stand out. I remember actually sitting at the kitchen table with my mom and she was kind of teaching me to write on one of those "Big Chief" writing tablets with the lines and she was teaching me how to write a capitol "E" and I insisted that the "E" had as many lines as you could possibly fit in it while she was trying to point out that it was actually just the three. I think that's kind of an early glimpse into my personality where if someone is trying to teach me something I might kind of believe I know better than they at the moment. I use computers all the time for reading and writing although I still really hold the idea that I write best when I write in long-hand on yellow legal pads first. I remember at home we had a Commodore 64 which looks very backwards now. The whole idea behind it was that you got a book of programs which you typed into the computer line by line then told it to run and then it did the thing that you told it to do. That was definitely the first exposure I had to computers at home. Political writing played a bigger part in my early experiences than I would have guessed. I remember a couple of examples distinctly. My dad was an air traffic controller and in the early 80's they went on strike and Reagan fired all of them. I remember my mom and dad, who didn't do a whole lot of things together, kind of composed together a letter to the president and I know that I did my own kind of, I would call it a parody now, I did my own version of it. I think I remember asking someone how to spell "hate" [Laughing] because the feeling toward the president in our house where suddenly we went from an income to not and income was not very positive. I can't remember really any reading experiences at home; I know they happened but I don't remember. I know when people say, "What kind of books did you have at home?" I can only vaguely remember one about three little dachshunds maybe and one about maybe a steam shovel that I thought was a dinosaur, I think that was one. But I don't really remember books being a big part of growing up. I remember when I was in kindergarten being pulled out a lot to see how many words I could read off of a list and I wasn't sure of that; I remember midway through kindergarten the teacher, Mrs. McDevitt, asked me to go to the first grade room and show them that I could read. In some ways it made me kind of proud but I also felt that I was taken off as a dog and pony show too.