Literacy: Personal History  by Aaron Seaman

    Reading and writing has been very important parts of Language Arts for me. I have learned something new about writing every year. For example, in seventh grade I learned more about the different genres of writing and also a little but of poetry. At first I only wrote because I wanted to keep my grades up and I didn’t want to get any zeros. I wrote because I didn’t want to have any missing homework assignments marked in the grade book. It was just another routine thing that we did almost every day. It wasn’t very interesting and I wouldn’t consider it the high point of my day. Then I had Mrs. Davis last year for Language Arts. She helped me open my eyes to writing more and it became much more interesting. After her class, I liked writing much more and she introduced some really interesting writing pieces to me.
    My favorite piece of writing that I wrote last year was a multi-genre paper. A multi-genre paper is a paper that is centered on one topic and had many different pieces with different genres that have something to do with the root topic. Some of the genres that I included in my paper were a newspaper article, a double-voiced poem, and a normal poem. This was one of my most favorite writing pieces that I did in her class. It was fun to experiment with a bunch of different types of genres combined into one big paper. We wrote a practice piece for each of the different types of genres. We could have also included an invitation or a thank-you note if we chose to. It was really fun to experience writing in a different way like that because I am used to writing only one piece at a time instead of many different types in one paper.
    We also read some interesting books last year in Mrs. Davis’s class. One of the forms of reading that we did was something called literary circles. Literary circles were basically where four or five people read a book together and answered a few questions about each set of chapters together. I personally read a book called Petey. We read this particular book in our literary circles groups. Petey was about a man who had some mental deficiencies when he was a baby. About 70 or 80 years later, he is in a nursing home and a young boy starts to visit him regularly. The rest of the book is about their relationship and how it grows over time and they help each other out in many ways.
    We read another book that we read aloud as a class called The Outsiders. It was about two town gangs that had always been rivals with each other. They were constantly getting into fights and trying to ruin each other’s lives. They had hated each other for so long of a time because they would constantly be teasing each other whenever they met up with each other. This book showed us how violence doesn’t pay in the long run and that it is better not to even get yourself into those situations in the first place.
    That year in Mrs. Davis’s class we learned about short story writing. This was a very fun unit for me because you could use your imagination as much as you wanted to and there weren’t really any guidelines or boundaries. Basically, all she did was give us a picture from a magazine. She would then tell us to write a short story in which our picture was the setting for the story. After that, we could just let our imagination run wild and write down any ideas that popped into our head.
    Mrs. Davis’s class was a very important phase in my literacy history because she opened my eyes to many great forms of writing that I can use in the future. We also read some really cool books in her class. That helped me to see all the different types of books that are out there today.

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