From the nascence of my academic career I have had a love affair with the written word. The idea of literacy as being anything other than the celerity and exactitude of one’s reading and comprehension was encountered either with suspicion or malison. I collected obscure words the way a philologist might look for Confederate stamps. Every new word was a discovery, empowering me to say things other people couldn’t understand, or change the tone of my dialogue through elevated diction. I was recognized early for my reading ability: I read voraciously, with the same desperation as a man who is drowning paddles to keep his head afloat. Nothing was off limits; nothing I could read was uninteresting. I read my father’s chemistry textbooks and my mother’s sociology ones. Often I did not comprehend what they were talking about, but I was enthralled by the phraseology – whether it was the almost intentional obfuscation of a chemistry text or the liberal epistemology of modern social theory. Even when I didn’t understand what it said I was fascinated by the phraseology. My parents deigned that I could read for only 2 or 3 hours a day, afraid I’d become some sort of pariah.
As passionate and interested as I was about reading (and to some degree writing – the pale, weak reflection of the strength and power I was reading) I was not as adept at the “social arts” – to be more precise I was completely uninterested in them. Speaking was only a way for me to say what I was thinking, hopefully in the simplest way possible. I learned early on that when I tried to speak the way I read and wrote I was treated with wide eyes and irritation. People don’t like having to struggle for meaning in day to day conversation. They’d far rather hear “day-to-day” than “quotidian.” This same phenomenon continues even today, often even in upper level classes (graduate classes) my fellow students get irritated because they don’t know the individual words in my speech. They get so distracted by the trees they don’t see the forest. This phenomenon has followed me my entire life, and it was a lesson learned early that when I spoke to others I had to lower my discourse. The frustration at having to move from what I thought was natural dialogue to the pedestrian ranks of mundane conversation made me unwilling to posit anything other than what was absolutely necessary.
Listening, however, was not too difficult. I started to become known as a “good listener,” which, as close as I can tell, means that you say “uh-huh” a lot while other people talk. I didn’t mind other people talking, and just asking them questions because it took the impetus for speech (ergo alienation) away. Instead I could sit back, ask appropriate questions that made the speaker think I was engaged, and go on with my own internalized and solipsistic self-explorations. In point of fact, I often engage in the same activities in graduate school. I like to think I am very good at prompting the professor at precisely the moment I am working on something entirely different.
When it came to anything having to do with the physical faculties, however, I was totally boned. My small motor control is awful at best and borderline handicapped most of the time. As a result my handwriting was just abysmal. I regularly earned “D’s” in penmanship throughout elementary school. Similar my drawing attempts have remained pretty much at kindergarten level to this day. I simply can’t draw a straight line, somewhere between my brain and my hand the message is garbled and lost, and what manifests from my fingertips looks not unlike the line a drunken man would walk in a roadside sobriety test. That doesn’t keep me from painting, but I do the sort of abstract impressionism which is heavy on thought and very low on skill with the turn of the brush. It’s not that I can’t envision a straight line; it’s that I cannot execute one.
Literacy has grown beyond simply the ELA ones, however. As Gunther Kress says “[i]t is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from a vast array of social, technological and economic factors” so I have to apply a more contemporary, multi-modal, ideology to my analysis of literacy (Kress 1). Taking the concept of literacy and applying it to other parts of my life I have found that I have some frightening shortages in areas that are valuable and have real impact on my day to day life. A careful examination of things I’m “good at” and not “good at” have shown me that I am lacking some fundamental literacies in areas that affect me daily. I need “new tools for thinking with, new frames in which to place things, in which to see the old and new” and to apply this new method of viewing the world around me to not only the things which I can immediately recognize as necessary in day-to-day life, but also the ones that apply obliquely (Kress 8). There are things I need to work on in my personal life, like being more compassionate. Further, I need help with adult literacies such as understanding plumbing, or accounting, or money management. Finally, I have general interests, like learning how to play drums, which also could use considerable development.
My interpersonal literacies are a mess. I’m pretty good at understanding where people are coming from, but I have very little interest in how they feel or what they want. In a lot of ways I’m like a teenager, with an underdeveloped sense of guilt. Certainly, I understand other people’s perspectives and points of view, I understand what drives people. I credit all my reading with that: I feel the real goal of modern literacy is to help develop that critical thought which allows a modern reader to apply the fictional situations of classic literature and apply them to day to day life and dealings. However, once we have gotten past the perceptive portion of interpersonal relationships I’m a wreck. I really can’t drum up a lot of compassion; I can’t pretend to be interested in things which have little or no value to me. My friends say that I’m bad at “small talk” I just think I’m not very good at faking it, or at lowering the discourse.
As awful as I am at dealing with people on a personal level (I think I manage pretty well professionally) I’m even worse at plumbing. My dishwasher broke, so I bought a new one and paid for delivery and installation, only to have the installer take one look at my plumbing, say he wasn’t going to do it, and summarily leave. Apparently someone had soldered my waterline, which made it a plumbing, and not an installation, concern. Being unduly certain of my own abilities, I decided I could attach my own hose. The next 3 or 4 days of cursing under a cramped kitchen sink, and my repeated sprayings as I tried to solder the new connection on, quickly taught me that I had absolutely no business trying to do what I was doing. I eventually hired a plumber, who was in and out in less than 10 minutes. I spent more time explaining the problem than it took him to fix it. I got a bill for $150 for my trouble. I learned a valuable lesson. I am plumbing-illiterate.
Similarly, I have absolutely no concept of the stock market. I’ve looked at mutual funds, stock portfolios. I understand the IDEA of stocks and bonds, diversifying my portfolio, but I am so risk averse that the practice of investing terrifies me. As a result I’m like an 80 year old woman: I invest by finding good rates on CD’s, which are FDIC insured, and put my money there. In the last year this has proven to be a not-so-bad policy, many of my investment-savvy friends have lost 40% of their portfolios in the last year. However, eventually the market is sure to turn, and I need to know when the appropriate time to put my money in the ring is. Of course, right now it’s sort of a moot point since I’m putting myself through graduate school, so my investment money has shrunk considerably in the last 6 months, but I’m hoping once I get the pay raise from the program I’ll have extra money again and I know I need to become more canny, more literate, about the market so that I can make educated decisions about how to invest my money. I’d like to retire some day…
Finally, there are skills I’d like to have that I’ve never put any real time or effort into, but which appeal to me broadly. The example I’m going to use is playing the drums. I’m a good guitar player (at least I’m accomplished and other people tell me I’m good) and I’m a very good slap bass player, but put me in front of a drum kit and I look like a 9 year old that skipped his Ritalin and ate 3 lbs of jellybeans. I’m spastic, I’m out of control, and, most importantly, I’m a complete failure at using my hands and my feet simultaneously to keep time. I’d really like to learn how to play the drums, but both the initial cost of the kit, and the likelihood that my girlfriend would be pretty angry at me spending hours of cacophonous banging in the basement, have kept me from putting much effort into the dream. Although the Rock Band video game has a drum kit, so I’m working on it that way. I’m just not sure how well the electronic drums from the game translate into real drumming ability.
Ultimately as educators we are at the crux of a decision about redefining literacy. Pundits such as Kress are now suggesting that the physical page is no longer the benchmark of literacy, but instead the discourse has moved to the screen, whether it be on a computer, television, or cell phone (Kress, 9). But expanding the definition of literacy, and recognizing its modality, takes a staid and established measure of what it means to be literate and transforms it into a state of “ephemeral cogitation” as Ezra Pound characterized Hell. By accepting that the definition changes the academic world must be very careful to establish the parameters of what literacy means, to attempt to rein it in, lest the definition become so broad that it becomes a semiotic black-hole and simply ceases to have any significant discursive meaning. I am willing to accept the screen as a new measure of literacy, and I am willing to explore the idea that “knowledge” and “proficiency” with differing skills can approach the idea(l) of literacy. However, I am afraid that accepting plumbing or drumming as reasonable literate modes opens the Pandora’s box so widely that we may never get it shut again.
Works Cited:
Kress, Gunther, Literacy in the New Media Age, Routledge, 2003
