A Literacy Story
"Wendy's Words"
Anonymous (2010-08-04)

>>WENDY MANSON: Well I was born in Indiana. My grandparents, same driveway, out in the country. My mother and father never had any formal schooling past high school, so they worked all the time. We did get the newspaper and they did make grocery lists, but that was pretty much the only reading and writing I remember happening in the house as I was growing up. But then I don't remember too much these days. I have some of my early writings and so I could look back on them, but don't remember actually composing them. It is fun to look back like when I'm just at home writing a letter to my dad who was just at work. It's not like I wasn't going to see him for weeks. 

Or in school it was pretty much, writing was all about penmanship. It was about penmanship and not about composition. We would color the pictures of the blue jay and we would copy the sentences on the board about the blue jay, and then we'd color the picture about the cardinal and write the sentences about the cardinal from the board. And therefore we had a bird book, that kind of thing.

I don't remember anything in middle school. I do remember on my own creating a lot of fantasy stories, very lengthy pages and pages of fantasy stories, trips. In sermons, writing these compositions when I probably should have been listening to the sermon instead of composing my fantasy story about running off from home. But those are my own writings that came from my own ideas from my heart, not anything that was assigned to me are the few things I do remember.

I had to take composition courses and I was reading, growing up and reading. I loved to go to the library and I loved to check out the big Castle book that was a coffee table big and I could barely carry it. I remember that. It had lots of guilded and gold and all sorts of fancies, but never to read. So just like my students today, I wonder why they like the pictures so much. 

Apparently my favorite book growing up was Little Toot. I remember reading a lot of controversial stuff for girls when they were growing up because that was juicy. My mom would have a cow if she read it.