Identity Within Literacy

 

Reading has been an integral part of my identity since the moment I began to exist. My mother read to us at bed time until I was around 14 years old. I always had a book in my hands throughout my primary school years. I couldn’t get enough. I escaped into artificial realities in order to ignore my own. The characters were my friends when I felt I did not have any. I was able to critique my own experiences through The Reappearance of Sam Weber by Jonathon Fuqua and felt less alone. I saw myself in Candy Quackenbush in The Abarat by Clive Barker, and became brave and fearless because of her. Through literature, I was able to grow and better understand both myself and the world around me

My relationship with writing on the other hand is terrible. I so badly wanted to be a writer and move people with my words but anxiety got the best of me. I reread my own words after a time and feel so much shame and embarrassment. I also have a great fear that the strings of words I put together have already been written before, therefore rendering my thoughts and ideas uninspired and unoriginal. I hate that idea. So I try not to write unless academically or professionally required. Books never made me feel this way.

When I first started learning how to code, my apprehension to write disappeared. I no longer needed to worry about how my words would be perceived by others (or myself) and could focus on sharing my thoughts and ideas through the small games or computer simulations I created. I made this computer simulation during the pandemic as a way to both process/understand what was happening around us as well as engage my students in learning to program through a real life problem they could identify with. We had to pick apart the individual systems within the problem and how they all relate to each other, figure out how to reproduce them, decide which parts of the problem did not need to be represented while keeping the story intact, and how to utilize this information to look for potential solutions. This is exactly how we utilize reading and writing within our English, social studies, science, and math classrooms. For me, this created far less pressure.

In terms of critiquing writing, I have a different approach than most departments. I am assessing students’ ability to execute the engineering design process, communication of development processes, and understand the content specific outcomes of computer programming. I worry little about the writing conventions in the content they write in English and focus more on what it is they are trying to convey to assess whether or not they understand the process and how their program works. I do need to be more critical of their syntax and organization when assessing their programs, however, computer programming simply does not work if a word is spelled incorrectly, a comma is missing, or an indentation is slightly off. They are able to quickly self-assess whether they’ve written their code correctly because it will immediately throw an error and point them in the direction of how to remedy the issue.