I was sitting in my room behind my computer and was looking and the blank screen on my laptop and was thinking to myself what story I should tell about my literacy? I’m not really sure if I can come up with anything! But then I start to think about the time when I was just a little kid, and I couldn’t read or write. I was very interested in reading since I was a child growing up in Iran. I remember that I was grabbing my mom or my dad magazine’s and look through all the pictures and wondering what is it saying? Then I would go to my dad and asking him to tell me what all these word surrounding these pictures means? So my dad was putting his glasses on while he was smiling at me and looked at the page that I was pointing at, then he start to read it to me loud and clear; at that point I was very jealous of my dad, that how can he read so well and I couldn’t ? and he would tell me that:”Don’t worry once you go to school they will teach you and you can read anything you want as good as me or even better”.
My father explained to me that he felt books were very important and that I had been exposed to books from the beginning. I was read to by many family members such as aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. He also stressed that I was a very verbal child at a young age and had been around mostly adults for the first few years. My vocabulary started at about five months and by two years had clear structured sentences. As I was learning how to speak, I was also introduced to letters and their sounds. By the time I was four and a half I was able to write and read my name and the alphabet. As I learned how to speak, read, and write I also taught my younger brother.
There are two grades during school I remember that made an impact on me. They were kindergarten and sixth grade, the beginning and end of elementary school. Kindergarten was a time when I began to read. I remember drawing pictures of things and writing what they were. My parents did sight words on flash cards with me. I also learned how to understand words and read sentences. According to my dad, by the time I was in first grade I was ahead of the class in reading and comprehension. Then came sixth grade and I remember the writing. I loved to read poetry, plays, and stories at this time of my life, but I can’t remember what books I read. I loved being in school throughout elementary and learning, but something happened when I left elementary school.
The next period of my life brought me to junior high and high school. Somehow I got lost during my junior high years and didn’t have the same desire to learn. I still enjoyed school, but struggled more to find my place and once I went to high school it became more of the social time. Reading became a chore and I remember reading romance stories in math class, because I found them more interesting than the algebra and trigonometry. I was not a bad student and I still learned, but I wasted so much of my potential and previous knowledge. I needed a challenge and direction.
All these changed when I decided to move to U.S. and live on my own. The first 2 years was very hard for me to adapt since I was from a totally different culture and more importantly the English was my second language, but I manage to arrange my life back together after a few years. I started working and going to college part time. I took many classes in ESL before I was able to take my major classes. My literacy journey took a completely different turn during this time. I began to read incessantly, but of a different type of material. I lived, ate, and breathed in English books and literatures. My purpose for reading had changed as well as my attitude. I knew that I had to read to know how to do my home works and how perform my job and be able to communicate with others. I also had to teach myself to read even when the material wasn’t as pleasing as it should be. During this time I became very confident in my ability to learn and perform my job due to what I learned through my reading. This confidence helped me to grow as a person and professionally. This was a very significant time in my life because I still to this day rely on what I had learned during my time living in the U.S.
My desire of reading and writing is what has brought me to this period of my literacy journey. I am reading with a specific purpose to learn the how and why of reading. And I hope to be a positive part of my children’s literacy journey in future by providing them with skills and enjoyment of reading. Using experiences from my own journey and what I have learned, I want to provide my children with their own experiences and to guide them to be aware of their literacy journey and take ownership of it.
In writing this story about how I became literate, I had to look at how I was raised within my home. It helped me to see that the values of what my parents showed me in the importance of reading and writing are what shaped me in my own values as an adult. I also realized that literacy is a lifelong process and always evolving as you are in different situations in your life. I am very grateful to my parents for teaching me the value of an education and the skills they provided for me to be successful in my journey.