Below Average?
Marshall Bowen, Lauren (2009-05-19)

>>INTERVIEWER: Do you want to state your name?
>>LAUREN MARSHALL BOWEN: My name is Lauren Marshall Bowen.
>>INTERVIEWER: And what is your story about?
>>LAUREN MARSHALL BOWEN: So my story is about learning how to read as a kid, which was mostly what I learned from my parents and my grandparents.  Reading was very important in my family when I was little.  Everyone I knew read to me and I loved being read to, I would bring books out and demand, at all times of day, "Please read to me." And of course one of my favorites, like a lot of kids in my generation, was Dr. Seuss and we would read those over and over again to the point where I'd had them memorized, and I could just see the page and recite it.  And I would really love-my parents probably did this because I was only 3 1/2-4 years old the time, would make me read to other relatives, and they thought for sure that I knew how to read at that age, which I didn't, I just memorized the stories.  I used to trick my grandfather a lot into thinking that I was some prodigy, but that wasn't true.  But I did eventually learn how to read and write a little bit before I started school.  And my mother remembers, quite bitterly, when I went to first grade they would do all these evaluations at the beginning.  We would have to read to people and then they give us a piece of paper, one of those green lined papers, to say, "How many words can you write?  Write down as many things as you can." And I filled up the page because that was one of my favorite things to do, was to learn how to spell things, and I probably didn't spell them all right, and I probably wrote things wrong, but I filled up the page and asked for another one.  And they said, "Oh no no, that's enough." And I felt really disappointed that I couldn't finish it.  But then during my parents' first parent teacher conference when I was a student, the teachers told them that I was below average reading level.  Which was sort of surprising to them, and I've been told later that a lot of kids in my school knew me as the girl who could read because I just loved doing it so much and always had my nose and book.  So my parents didn't really believe that and so they said, "Well what do we need to do?" And, "Oh nothing, she'll come around, she'll develop." And by the end of the year, miraculously, the teachers said, "Oh, she's great!  She's above average," and sort of took credit for a lot of what I had accomplished that year, or at least she said that I had accomplished.  And my mom is still very, very bitter about that [Laughter].  So I think for me a lot of it was developing that interest at home.  I remember my grandmother giving me a composition book, one of those black and white composition books, and telling me just to write stories.  And I would, I'd write plays and drag my poor cousins in to perform them.  And whether they liked it or not they always did.  And reading stories are allowed the people or telling stories to friends and family members.  So it was really-family was really kind of where literacy came in for me, and still does.  I still do studies of my grandmother now and her new literate practices.  I talk to my mother a lot about her at work literacies and things like that.  So it's something that started with family and has continued there.  And even though I'm very immersed in kind of academic literacies too, I always have to go back to that.  That is where it got started and that's where it continues.