Allow Myself to introduce Myself Volume 3

School and literacy haven’t always co-existed happily for me I recently wrote a poem and one of the lines is I wanted to teach before I’d been taught. In the 11th grade I was put into advanced American Literature which was part of a humanities track that was reserved for “really smart” students and my scholastic achievement to that point certainly didn’t warrant my placement in such a class. On the first or second day the teacher had the class select a passage and analyze its meaning. I can’t remember what passage I chose, why I chose it, or what I said, but I can remember Ms. Scarborough telling me I was brilliant at the bottom of my paper. She lectured about how reading was as much about understanding what the words on the page meant as it was about knowing how to pronounce them and use them correctly. Her class wasn’t just about reading stories it was about understanding them and understanding how and why they made people feel the way they did. Ms. Scarborough was one of many really good teachers I’ve had and her influence is part of the reason I want to be a teacher to this day, she allowed me to look at literacy and my relationship with it in a completely different way. I learned how to read at four but I didn’t learn why I needed to read until I was sixteen. I want to help my students get this place, I want to be a teacher that they remember for teaching them why words are important not just that they are.