Literacy Journey

Hi, my name is Andrew Chilton and I am an alcoholic reader. I've been suffering from this disease now for almost ten years. Like most, I started when I went off to college, partying in the library, and hanging out with all the wrong people, like professors and aspiring scholars. 

I received B.As in English and Religion/Philosophy in college (very pragmatic choices I know) and went onto graduate school in Comparative Religions/Philosophy, with the plan of becoming a philosophy professor later in life.  I should have known that I was meant to be an English teacher however, when I started skipping my required graduate readings to continue voraciously devouring fiction. I just completed my first year as a lateral entry English teacher at Surry Early College High School—I taught British and American literature—and loved every moment of it. 

Reading for me was a way to both engage and separate myself. I was suddenly invited into a timeless and infinite room of ideas and people that I had never had access to before and I was also allowed creative and emotional space to surround myself with comforting resources to enlighten and nourish my inner self.

The first book I ever truly connected to was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the most unlikely place: Myrtle Beach, Spring Break 2003. My heart still races whenever I think of that first fateful read—I was the criminal and I read as if I would be sentenced to death if I didn’t finish it quick enough. I found both a personal connection (inner guilt, Christian existentialism) and a philosophical inquiry of ideas.  From Crime and Punishment, I delved into the world of fiction, devouring whole shelves of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Steinbeck, Saramago, Salinger, Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor.  On one level I was being entertained, on another I was escaping reality, on a third I was joining an intellectual discourse with these authors and my peers, and finally I was exploring what it meant to live a full and meaningful existence.

As I’ve grown older and through the experiences I’ve had I found myself changing in my relationship to reading. Upper-level English courses took most of the fun out of reading fiction and now that I teach fiction, I find myself fighting not to “tie the [book] to a chair/to torture a confession out of it” as the poet Billy Collins warns us (Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”). My current reading habits are just as voracious as before but they are dictated by my schedule and my career. For years now I always have three books going at a time: a work of fiction (usually an unread classic), nonfiction (either philosophy, cultural criticism, history, or pedagogy), and a book of poetry.

The story of my journey as a writer has always been a little more of a up-hill battle. Granted, I find writing poetry and journal entries quite easy, but I have always had a difficulty in writing for others. I associate judgment and critique to writing—particularly academic writing. Hence, my procrastination on finishing my Master’s thesis and the constant checking of the Word Count (I’m at 526, just 224 to go). I simply had too many teachers tell me that what I was writing was just not good enough: “work on this” “fix this” “say it like this”. Perhaps it was encouragement, but to a fledgling young writer every single word matters. Luckily I had one young teacher, Miss Leslee Johnson, who always encouraged me to be the best writer I could be. If not for her, I would not have the courage to write this.

From this narrative history, I can now reflect on how traumatic the schooling process can be on the literacy of a student. The graded comments on essays, the tightly scheduled and segmented reading assignments, and the arbitrary reading comprehension quizzes can all create negative effects in young students. School has the immense ability to both inspire and expose students to wonderful sources of truth and beauty, but in many cases, including mine own, formal schooling can be a place of judgment, fear, and superfluous analysis. This is truly the first time I thought very critically over my past experiences with literacy, so I hope to be more mindful of this as I redesign my own classes. To reflect on my own practices, I hope to always design learning that will reduce anxiety and unease that revolves around reading and writing and I will encourage the nourishment of the inner child. I hope to learn in this course the appropriate methods and tools to develop this mission.