100 Chamberlain Avenue
Mareck, Anne

>>ANNE: So I want to start my literacy narrative now. My name is Anne Mareck and I was born in California in 1950. What I want to tell you about is how I learned to read and I also want to tell you about how I found my way to higher education which I didn't even begin a bachelor's degree until I was forty years old. I had just finished my PhD and I am 58. A lot of that had to do with my upbringing and first I grew up in a fairly working class family, mixed class family. There was a huge emphasis on reading but it was reading for pleasure and reading for inquiry. My father had the idea that anything that anyone would ever want to know was out there to find if you would just look it up so we spent a lot of time at libraries and various places. So I was very, very intrigued with reading; my whole family read. My brother who was my hero, my brother Jeff, used to sit around at night, he was about ten years older than me, and he would read the newspaper and he would read his auto mechanic magazines - he was quite a mechanic. I would sit next to him and I would stare at that page trying to understand what was so important to him and the way I learned to read was he would just put his arm around me and pull me up next to him and he would just start rolling his finger under the words and he would read whatever he was reading which was usually things like the classified ads and the sports page and things like that and car magazines, it was always mechanics. So by the time I got to kindergarten, I was six actually, I already knew how to read so my teachers all thought I was smart. So I went through school being an excellent reader and that was coupled with both my father and mother who were very inquisitive folks and literally anything that we needed to know my dad or mom would go out and look it up or find some written source. So as a kid if I had anything that needed to be fixed or built or figured, there was some book or some magazine somewhere. So when I finished high school I had no interest in college whatsoever; to me it didn't make any sense to go to college when all you had to do was go out and go to the library or go to some office and find materials and read them and then you would know. So that's my literacy story and I don't know what else to say so, bye.