My Literacy Story
Stone, David (2010-08-05)

>>DAVID:  My first recollection of writing was writing as punishment. And that was when I was in second grade. So that was a fairly standard thing for teachers to do. There was only once during second grade that I had to do the writing. I had to write something ten times that I would never be late for school again. There was a huge field between our house and the school and I always had a hard time not paying attention to the various things I would encounter in the field on the way. So it caught up with me once. I had to write ten times that I would not be late for school and it was kind of fun because it was the first time that I really had to write anything with any length. And so I did the standard thing of writing "I, I, I, I, I, Will, Will, Will, Will, Will...", but it was fun. I guess that's very different from what kids today experience.

It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I took a course where writing was a significant component. The teacher was an older woman. She was very, very meticulous and she taught the best writing course I could ever have imagined. She would expect us to spend a huge amount of time writing. She spent a huge amount of time grading. She would read four essays from people in the class after grading each assignment. And my goal was to always have one of my essays be one of the four that she read. So she was very motivational.

I was fortunate in that the national science (inaudible) for applications is here in town and they were offering teacher workshops. So I would go to a workshop each week. It would be about a three hour workshop after school dealing with software application of something with hardware. And that was really, really valuable for me. Today I use all sorts of different technologies. I enjoy writing. I try to publish with some regularity. I also am involved in a number of student technology competitions, and  much of what we do is writing-based in the first round and in the second round, the students need to take what they have developed and they need to go one step further and give us a video regarding it.  So video applications are pretty significant.

Teaching at University Laboratory High School, which is part of the University of Illinois campus, is different than teaching at other schools in a number of ways. One of the things that I have done is I have published a number of different things. I think that our environment at the school is very open for that sort of thing and I found that writing for various science applications is not immensely difficult and chances for acceptance are really pretty good. I enjoy the writing process. I enjoy the feedback that I get from anonymous reviewers, and I receive a lot of reinforcement as a result.