"Long Road to "Literacy"
Watson, Jane R. (2009-03-28)
>>JANE WATSON:  Okay, well my name is Jane Watson. I am in my second semester of teaching at Yuba College and Sierra College. I guess what I want to talk about is sort of how I felt illiterate when I was younger and then how that sort of changed once I empowered myself through reading and writing. It is kind of a sad story in a way but it has a happy ending. When I was seven my mom died so I grew up in children's homes. 
>>INTERVIEWER:  What kinds of homes?
>>JANE WATSON:  Children's homes. You know, education wasn't really that important; it was more about what vocation can you have so that when you are rejected at 16 you can take care of yourself. So there were no books, really, around but I did discover once when I was punished and couldn't watch TV or play outside or anything like that, that there was a set of Enid Blyton Famous Five books. Enid Blyton, I don't know if American audiences know him, but he is, well, was a famous children's author who writes these kind of famous spy-group of children that go off exploring, you know, very independent, had these great adventures. I read through them and felt that -- wow; I'd discovered this great thing called reading that nobody had told me about. But meanwhile in my secondary school in London I was receiving red ink all over my papers. I came of age during the time where they discovered sort of audio testing, grammar kind of drills. I absolutely hated my English class; it was all about grammar drills and getting red ink on my papers.
>>JANE WATSON:   Kind of to jump ahead a little bit here, about 20 years later: I finally got my chance to go to community college so I started off there. Actually, I am skipping some things; let me go back.
[Laughs]
>>JANE WATSON:   So, I ended up -- sorry I am really distracted. 
>>INTERVIEWER:  What do you mean?
>>JANE WATSON:   Okay, but you are looking over there and there, so --
>>INTERVIEWER:  Oh I am sorry; she's talking to me too. 
>>JANE WATSON:   Okay. 
>>INTERVIEWER:  We jumped ahead and then you were coming back to something. 
>>JANE WATSON:   Yeah. So, when I was an adult and I went ahead and left the children's home, I got married at a very young age then went overseas and lived on a military base. There wasn't very much to do and I ended up with a partner that was abusive so I had to, you know, kind of rediscover myself and try to empower myself in different ways. I discovered the base library so I ended up reading all the books there. It was kind of like, for me reading was like escapism.  I started off -- which is terrible to say being an English teacher- but I started off reading romance novels. I quickly became bored with those but then I moved on to other stuff. >>JANE WATSON:   When I finally got myself out of that situation, as I said, I was able to enter community college. That is where is it really sort of took off for me. I started thinking I wanted to be a medical student, be a doctor. My first semester I took biology and I was terrible at it. So I got myself into this study group with people who I thought were good at biology and then they needed help with English. I didn't think that I was very good at it; I was just taking my English 1A and my very first English class at an American college. I started to feel competent, you know, whereas before I had been always told that I wasn't. So we kind of swapped. They would help me with biology and I would help them with English. It wasn't until somebody said "Well, why are you wanting to go into the medical field? Why don't you do something with English? You are really good at it, you are really helping us." That is when it kind of clicked for me. I realized that I wasn't that person that I had been mocked as being. I went through the community college and I transferred to UC and was successful at that; eventually ended up back in grad school and now I am teaching. 
>>INTERVIEWER:  What teaching did you say?
>>JANE WATSON: I am teaching at Yuba College and Sierra College. I also taught as a grad student at Sacramento State University as well. 
 >>INTERVIEWER:  So do these events that you just mentioned, do they factor into your teaching now, your reading practices now?
>>JANE WATSON: Oh absolutely. I am teaching at Yuba mostly developmental writing, basic writers I think most people refer to them as.  So I am very transparent in my pedagogy and I normally start of the first day with icebreakers and that sort of thing. I give them a little background about myself. I am like, you know, "I started like 10-15 years ago at this college as a student, a reentry student. Here is all the obstacles I had. You can overcome these obstacles too and you can succeed." We do a lot of this thing called USSR which is uninterrupted silent sustained reading. For about 20 minutes we read. They can bring any book that they like in, fiction or nonfiction, of their own choosing. We read for about 20 minutes without any interruption and then we write in journals. It is amazing at the end of the semester how many students tell me that they had never, ever read a book all the way through. Not only did they read a book for the very first time in their lives all the way through, now they are reading two or three books. By the end of the semester they have almost become bookworms, voracious readers. 
>>INTERVIEWER:  So where did you get this idea at, to do the sustained reading?
>>JANE WATSON: Well I got it from another -- oh, it is kind of a long story -- a colleague of mine that we went through grad school together is teaching at another community college. There is a British woman there and she said "I think you should meet her. You both are British." I had never met her but she had that idea for USSR. So we make a big joke of it, you know, the USSR, the old name for the Soviet Union. But it was, it was; not every basic writer or developmental writer catches onto it, but a good portion to make it worthwhile doing. 
>>INTERVIEWER:   Some of them hadn't read books before. Do they ever have trouble locating books that they want to read? Do you help them with that?
>>JANE WATSON: Sometimes. I tell them "If you pick a book and it doesn't work for you, then don't feel that you have to struggle through." I mean, I really want you to love reading. I mean, a lot of what teachers have told developmental writers and what we have heard in the past, is that you have to read such and such a book. Then they get this fear of reading, they get this fear of writing. So I try to undo a lot of this through making it fun. Reading is fun, you know, discover it for yourself. They do; some of them have trouble choosing books and some of them feel like "Can I bring this romance book in? Or this pirate adventured?" And I am like "Sure, bring it in because that might be the catalyst for you, right. That might be the book that sends you on the path of reading. So it is okay; there is no illegitimate sources of reading in here. If they come and they don't have their books then I send them off to the library and they have to come back with a book. Many of them try four or five but then they end up with one that they like. Then at the end of the semester, towards the end of the semester, we get in a circle and we have them present their book that they have been reading and they tell a little bit about it, whether they would recommend it or not, to the rest of the class.
>>INTERVIEWER:  Is the goal, then, to get them through one book? Or how long to -
>>JANE WATSON: Yeah. However far they get and if they don't finish that's fine. We don't, you know, hold them up as values for that. It is just to get the joy of reading, reading in a different context and it being sort of punitive or just about school. Sort of reading for its own sake because it is fun. That is what I am trying to do; get them to think reading can be fun. You don't just have to read for school; you can read. I suggest to all of them that they pick up a habit of reading for about 10-15 minutes at the end of the day, you know, as a way to calm yourself down from the business of the day. Just maybe get into a habit of reading; it builds the vocabulary, confidence and knowledge and all sorts of things. Yeah. 
>>INTERVIEWER:  That is a great, great job! I want you to hit that same button again.