Transcripts of Warren Francis

Let's try that again. My name is Warren Francis, I go to school at the Ohio State University. I'm a student in linguistics and computer and information science. What else would you like to know? Can you tell me when you were born? I was born in 1983 in rural California, somewhere near Sacramento I moved away when I was 11 so I didn't really care about Geography at that point. It's somewhere near Sacramento. My, All my extended family is from California, and I came to Ohio at the end of 5th grade. Oh this is cool. Tell me about your parents will you? Where did they go to school, did they go to school? And you know, a little bit about that background please. My dad went to High School, but as he puts it, made it through by doing well in shop. My mom was very gifted in school but because of the turmoil that she had at home, she used school as a way to get away from home. And she, because she did so well in school, instead of excelling in school, she spent as little time in classes as possible and instead worked and used her ability to do well in school to get by with very little effort in school. When my dad graduated and my parents were married, he didn't have much desire to go to college, he was going to enter the forestry service. And my mom convinced him to go to school. So he got his bachelor's degree in Horticulture, and my mom got her Associates in Library Science. And where did they get the degrees from, which schools? Oh, my dad went to (...). And I think my mom's degree was from a community college but I'm not sure. 

When you were growing up, can you tell us just a little bit about what they used to tell you, what kinds of stories they used to tell you about education, or what kinds of sayings they had about education? How they felt about education, and your education and...? 

My mom was a primary driving force behind my education as a child. They, she believed very strongly that education was essential. Her favorite saying is "You have to have a shelf to put things on." So her efforts were to create shelves for me. Just to give me an opportunity to get a foundation for learning. So then I could learn whatever I wanted to learn later. How did she do that? Well when I was very small my parents were trying to decide should they get a computer. These are just coming out, should they get a bunch of books, or what should they do? And so my dad advocated computer, "It's the wave of the future" You just got to be able to handle this technology to get a job later. And my mom was very much an advocate of just books and reading and the simple stuff And again my mom was successful in persuading my dad, just like with college. So they ended up just getting me a lot of books, and my sister as well, and a lot of children's stories. My, I'll tell you my childhood is full of books. And so I developed a great love of reading. My parents would read to me until I learned to read, and then I spent as much time as I could reading. I really enjoyed it. Did you have how many sisters and brothers do you have? I have one younger sister, she's two years younger than me. And did your dad and mom read at home and what kinds of things did they read? Did they write at home and what kinds of things did they write? That's a good question. I don't remember them writing much at all. I know that they read. I didn't pay much attention to what they were reading. My mom, mostly I just remember her reading to me. I don't have many memories of my family just sitting down around the living room and reading novels or non-fiction. Magazines? Manuals? My dad would read, if he had a project, and he wanted to know how to do something he would read a book about, rather than hire a professional, he would read a book and learn how to do it himself. And then do it. My parents would read a religious magazine every month. We weren't real big on magazine subscriptions. The Bible? Yes, yeah we read the Bible. 

Can you tell me about your grandparents. Do you have any stories about your grandparents? Did they go to school? Did they have a love of reading, writing, or not? 

I don't, honestly I'm not very close with my grandparents. My grandparents on my mother's side have no connection to our family, it's a pretty tumultuous family life when my mom was growing up. My dad's parents are, we're still on friendly terms and everything but they live in California and we don't, their family wasn't very communicative, so we don't really interact with them much. When I was growing up, they lived several hours away. So they weren't in the home frequently, so I don't really know much about, much about them. Their schooling or what they do in their spare time, anything like that. So tell me, do you remember learning how to read? I remember a funny story that my mom would tell me, that she used to label the Christmas presents with what they were, so that she would remember later. Well in between the labeling of Christmas presents and Christmas I learned how to read. So Christmas Day I was going around the tree, and "All right!" And excited about all these different things that I was getting. Besides that, I don't remember not being able to read. I don't remember the process of learning to read. I just remember being excited about learning new things by reading. Illustrated science books I loved, things that would show the connections between different ideas. I used to love biographies. I liked learning about people's lives and the great things that people had done. Did you ever go to the library or a local library? Or did you get a lot of books from school? Well because my mom studied library science, she was a big advocate of the library. But she also had collected a lot of children's books, as she found one that was especially good, she would get it from a yard sale or whatever. But we definitely made a lot of trips to the library. 

Did you have a library card? 

Yes (chuckling) I do now, I did then. 

Oh that's cool. So tell me when you first started learning how to use computers? 

Well my earliest memory of using computers was from Elementary School. We would have.. I don't remember what they called it, but there was one day a week where we would spend an hour or two in the computer lab. And I remember just, kind of, at first being afraid or distant or whatever, about using this new technology. Breaking it or not realizing what it could do, or I don't know. But the more I learned about it, and the more I saw it make mistakes, the more I learned the rules of how the computer was working. And once, I think the most powerful thing for learning to use a computer, was to find the patterns of organization between different programs. If you always know to go to the "edit" menu to get the "copy" function, then you can just, you learn the patterns and the organization behind things, and it makes sense, and then you can do whatever you want. Did you gravitate toward computer use right away or...? I don't think it was right away. I think I had a great love of video games when I was a kid. Like which ones? Well I had a friend that had just about all of them. So I would go over to his house, play Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis all those things. I remember being amazed that these were computers. They were really simple ones but, "Boy, these computers were a lot more fun than the ones they had at school!" So I don't know, I just started to learn and be curious about computers, and just what made them tick and how they worked. Then when Jurassic Park came out and all the animation was made with a computer, I thought, "Boy, I... I've gotta learn how this is done. Because I was interested in Art at the time. My parents decided to make the investment and get a family computer. And also bought me an animation program for it. And I experimented with that and another 2 dimensional art program, and that was where my real love and comfort and... Comfort with computers and love of computers to see that they could be a tool for me, to do things that I wanted to do. At what age did you get that first computer? That's a good question. I was in Ohio so I was 12 or older. I think it was in Middle School. Maybe 6th or 7th grade? Did all the classes in Elementary and Middle School have computers for you to use? That's a good question. I think, if I remember right, in Elementary School there was just the one hour a week. In Middle School there was, I think we had a computer class that we went to, but to be honest I can't remember what they taught there. 

So most of the things I learned about computers were by going over to friends' houses and watching them get to the game that they were about to play or the things like that. And just learning by observing the, I don't know, the whatever was necessary to accomplish getting the game loaded and understanding the patterns of organization and how the computer was set up. By doing. Right, by doing. Did you have a question? I would like to have him, could you tell us something about, was there any relationship with your sister over the computers or book literacy? Especially because she was younger. Did you teach or do you remember teaching her to read, or reading to her or interacting with siblings? I do know that I read to my sister. I know that. I just remembered it, a different story, but... My relationship with my sister wasn't so much that of teacher. I don't know, we were competitive. (Laughing). We were not friends for an entire childhood, but, but I do remember that I read to her when she was very young. I think when I learned how to read the Christmas presents she was jealous. But besides that I'm not sure. 

Did she use a computer at all? 

She did, not nearly as much as I did, but she did use it and she did like to play with it. I think, I thought of it as my computer, so I wanted to get as much time on it as I could. But she did use the computer. Now what was the story that you remembered about something else? I remembered that I learned to read very early, and very well. And because I was doing well in school, the teacher would have me read to the class, when she was grading papers and things like that. That was just a little thing that I remembered when you mentioned reading to someone else. Well, now I know you're hard of hearing, and when did you, when did this happen to you, and do you have any connection, is there any connection between your being hard of hearing and your literacy? Or between the way you work with computers? I started to lose my hearing when I was 6 or 7 years old. The nerve hairs in my cochlea started dying from the highest frequencies down, to the lower ones. And they don't know why, the doctors don't know why it started. Is there anyone in your family that has any documented hearing loss? Yes there is. Well because the condition you described is generally there's a genetic strain of that. Yeah, my grandmother on my father's side, it was my father's mother, was born deaf. And I think there's also a great uncle that is completely deaf also. But my hearing stopped progressing after I had lost frequencies down to about 1500 Hertz. Which is enough that I can't hear consonants like S and SH, T, TH, F... All those things. Any of the Sibilant sounds. Right. And can you... Those fricatives, I remember those. Right, can you tell us about how this affected your schooling, and you reading, writing, computer use at all. I hadn't thought about that connection in this whole context until you just said that. My mom struggled to get the school system to accommodate me like a normal student. Let alone a hearing impaired student who could actually read. It was just hard. She was told that I would never be in a normal English class, that I would... Yeah, it was very difficult for her to be an advocate for me. I don't know of any connection directly from my hearing to my computer usage or things like that. Except I know that part of the reason why my parents were so eager to give me opportunities to learn is because they knew that the school was doing things like, instead of putting me in classes where I would learn, they would have me read to the rest of the students while the teacher was grading papers. And things like that. That she knew that she had a responsibility to help me learn, not just the school.