My Literacy Story
Lindsay, Bob

>>BOB: I always remember my mom reading, reading, reading. She read books, she read magazines, she was just always reading. My dad would read the newspaper and that was about it but mom was always reading. Writing on the other hand, I saw my dad's writings from work, they were notes and scribbles and that kind of stuff. So writing was never really a big thing in my home but my mom was a huge reader. One of my early memories of reading was my grandparents, my mom's parents, lived in Colorado and we were living here in the Midwest. We only had seen them once a year and I always had this favorite book and it's kind of coming back now "Where the Wild Things Are" and it's coming back now but it was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. When my grandparents would come I would always have my grandfather read that book to me and he read all sorts of other things to me too. He had a great, booming, deep voice and it was just the coolest thing in the world for me as a five, six, seven year old to hear my grandfather read those books. I have a very negative beginning in writing in school because I'm left-handed. When I started school in 1965 my kindergarten teacher, I still remember this, my kindergarten teacher - I picked up something, a crayon or pencil or whatever it was, and I picked it up with my left hand and she made me move it to my right hand. I was confused and mad and upset and all those emotions and when mom came and picked me up from school that day she asked how it went and I told her what happened. She turned the car around and went back to the school and she went in the school and I found out later had a discussion with the teacher and the principal about me being switched from being left-handed to right-handed. From that point on she didn't try to change me but I certainly didn't get any of the same kind of help with writing that right-handed kids do. In high school, the one thing that comes to mind was our typing class; it was a high school way before computers were around and we had to take typing class with typewriters. The business teacher, and I can't remember her name, she was very strict about the typing and how to type and all that. The room was set up where half of the room was manual typewriters and the other half was electric typewriters. We knew from asking the upperclassmen very quickly that you wanted to start on a manual because you spent nine weeks on one and nine weeks on the other and we learned from the upperclassmen that you really want to start on the manual and then progress to the electric because if you start with the electric typewriter - which the keyboard is fairly similar to a computer keyboard today - and went to the manual, in the manual you really had to bang the keys to make the effect to strike on the page. I like to incorporate technology in my classroom even though most of my high school has students who are better at computers than I am; I'm not sure that's a bad thing for them to know, it kind of reinforces what they have instead of me being the all-knowing expert in front of the classroom I ask them a lot of questions. I have them doing PowerPoints and I have them doing videos and I have them incorporating pictures and it's because I know they need to know that stuff and go forward even though I didn't know and I don't know a lot of it today I want them to have that experience. So again I think it's empowering to the students when they're working on a PowerPoint and I go watch and I see them doing something and I go, "How in the world did you do that?" And they get to teach me and I think that's an exciting thing for them and it's kind of cool for me too because I get to see them learning right there and that's what this profession is all about.