Muse1

India Sierra Muse Professor Jan Rieman English 1103 September 26, 2012 I honestly do not like this paper. I think I could have did much better if I had more time and put more effort into it. My favorite part of my paper is my introduction and my fourth body paragraph. I like the introduction so much because I had no idea what I was going to write about or how I was going to do this paper. When I talked to my mom she brought up a lot of options that I knew I could talk about but I knew I could not use all of them. I narrowed it down to the ones that meant the most and influenced me the most. In my fourth body paragraph I talked about my junior and senior year. Throughout those two years my life was really hard and I still managed with my school work and a part-time job. The IB Program was hard but I passed all my exams and got my IB diploma. I gained a lot of knowledge from writing multiple page papers and having rigorous classes. I have learned to like reading and writing a bit more since high school. Me then and Now: My journey of Reading and Writing When we first received this assignment in class I didnt know what exactly I was going to write about. I sat in my room for an hour trying to think about what exactly has affected my writing and reading, but nothing came to mind. I then resulted to calling my mom and asking her how I felt about writing and reading when I was a child. She then told me that many things have

Muse2 influenced my perception on reading and writing starting in elementary school. She told me that when I was in Preschool I would love to read small books and try to pronounce the big words. As I got older I became lazy and only wanted to read what I wanted to read. When I reached high school reading became more of an open and closed situation because I could pick certain books and read them for pleasure while others just read for a grade. At a very young age I picked up the bad habit of not liking to read. In elementary and middle school I did not enjoy reading at all. My mom would have to sit me down and read my assigned books with me. I would like to read the books that were interesting to me but not the ones that were assigned. We were so pressured to read because if we didn't we wouldn't get our star sticker for the day and our teachers would write on our reading logs that we didn't read. We had something called a Reading Log which was a list of all the books we

read that week and how many pages we read. The reading log went home with us everyday in our daily folders and

our parents had to sign to show that they saw them. To this day reading and writing still feels forced to me when im given certain chapters and a number of pages to write by a certain deadline. I do things simply for the good grade and a completion grade. By doing this there is a lack of gained knowledge. During high school I attended Grimsley Senior High School and my freshman year I had to read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson for summer reading. We also had 2 other books that we needed to read that summer, but this one seemed the most interesting because of the cover so I chose

Muse3 to read this book first. At first I didnt think I was going to like the book simply because I didnt like to read assigned readings. As I started to read the book I really liked it and I couldnt put the book down. It was a 224-page book and it took me no time to finish this book. This made me realize that I actually did like to read if I had interest in the book or the material. The other books that I had to read for summer reading I didnt end up finishing because I had no interest in them and they were boring. When school started we had a test on all 3 books and I had to force myself to read the remainder of the books. In this situation I only read the books for the grade and to pass the test. Another book I fell in love with was Jason & Kyra by Dana Davison. I am a really loving person and Ive often liked to read books about teenage love and relationships. This book was so interesting I read it in one day. It was about a basketball player falling in love with the weird nerd girl that nobody thought was pretty. After finishing this book I started to read more books by this author which had the same plot. Other books that had the same plots were introduced to me as well such as the collection of the Sarah Deesen books. At Grimsley High we had to complete 600 pages of supplemental reading each semester for a grade. We could choose to read any book that we wanted and we would have to have an oral conversation about the book with our English teacher. Our teachers would flip to a random page of the book and ask questions about who the characters were or what was going on relating to the main topic of the book. This influenced me to get books that interested me that I would actually read so I could get a good grade on my book discussion.

Muse4 My junior and senior year of high school I was in the IB Program. The IB Program is a program that consists of college levels courses that high school students can take in order to get credit for them to transfer to college. In this program we had to complete 150 community service hours in the categories of creativity, action, and service. We also had had to write a 4,000 word research paper in order to get our IB diplomas. It had all different requirements in which we had to follow and it was not easy at all. We started the paper our junior year and it was a 2 year work in the making. I had no motivation to get this paper done because I wasn't interested at first. As I started to research good topics under the category of history I choose to focus on the roles of women in the 1800s. My research question was What are the Reasonings of the Discontinued Gender Bias Against Women in the Workplace From the 1960s to the 1980s, and Their Fight for Equality? I did a lot of research for the answer to this question. I read numerous books, online articles, and descriptive essays. My paper ended up being 18 pages to meet the requirements. This process was very stressful because being an IB kid we had to keep up with 6 IB classes and turn in fragments of this research paper on the deadlines. My teacher, Mrs. Collie would discourage us on our writing-by-writing harsh comments and not really giving us anything positive about what we put our hard work into. She would just give out grades and it seemed that she would just pick numbers or a letter grade. Despite the negative comments on my paper I managed to finish the paper by letting my peers help me. This discourage many of us not to want to write anymore some people didn't do anymore of the assignments. I decided to go to my 10th grade teacher; Mrs. Corbett, for help. She would look at my paper and revise them for me so when I turned it in I got positive comments instead of negative ones. Mrs. Corbett also taught me while correcting my papers. She wanted me to get to the point where I didn't have to come to her and I knew my errors on my own. Throughout the experience of writing this paper I gained a lot

Muse5 of knowledge that I would have never known if I had not done this paper. For my final exam in IB English 12 we had to write a 15 page paper on two of the books we had read that year. We had to talk about how they related to each other and how they reflected the same aspects in different ways. This assignment became very repetitive because there is only so much you can say about two books relating to each other. I have learned to like writing and reading a little more over the years, I just tend to state the facts and get straight to the point. When I sit and reflect on how what has happened in my life that has structured my reading and writing so many things come to mind now. The most important things are the ones that I remembered first. I can say I these things would no have happened I would not be the person I am today. Reading and writing in a classroom setting is something I have not really been fond of, but it takes time to learn to like. I have started to stop doing things simply for the grade and for the right reasons which is to gain knowledge that I can us in my future.

India, Im glad you finally found something to write about. I know you were struggling with how to broaden your topic. This is a good start to your literacy narrative. You have a number of good examples. Here are some things to consider as you revise: go back and revisit the assignment sheet to see if you can get any other ideas from it. See where you might be able to complicate your narrative a bit by considering some of the issues weve been reading and talking about in classcultural influences of literacy, where you were given access to literacy and where you were denied it, etc. I

Muse6 suspect you can also broaden your look at this issue by thinking about that last issue I raise, which is the kind of writing you do outside of school.