Kayleigh Learns What an Essay Is (important literacy experience)

Throughout high school and before that, essays were evil.  They were stifling and formulaic and had to be pounded out in 45 minute blocks of time for AP tests.  No one ever had any fun writing an essay.
When I came to college it wasn't any different.  There they were, now called "papers", which I think is a better name.
I took Intro to the Essay because it was mandatory, I knew I wasn't going to like it because it was just going to be a continuation of the same old stuff.
We started off by reading Seneca and Montaigne, and I started to realize that I was wrong.  These were not boring, these things had their own voices.  I learned the French verb essayer, which means "to try".  So, an essay is a piece of writing in which one tries something.  To explain this or that, to convince people, to explore one's own thoughts.
That was astronomically more interesting.

Chimpanzees Have Religion (?)

How do we define religion so that it can be applied to non-humans?  Hint: click the link and read the excruciatingly long article that I had to read.
Ha!
Well, actually, all you need to know are the problems with current definitions of religion, and then read the conclusion bit that gives you the new "prototypical trans-species definition".

Then, read this one, and take some time to reconsider pretty much your entire life.  Not really, just your worldview.
                                                     

Why Did I Drink Coffee at 10pm?

That was not my smartest decision, although I did only drink half of it.  The rest is sitting in my fridge.

I was really into my last blog (which I lost due to password nonsense), and I'm attempting to rekindle the same sort of excitement two years later.

How is it possible that I'm a junior in college?  It's like the world expects me to go be an adult.
Umm, no.

That never fails to make me smile.  If I could scuttle away from responsibility like that you can bet I would.  Me and every other person ever.

I'm going to sleep now.

In full makeup

Just kidding, I'm actually going to go do this:

Goodnight!

What is a Literacy Sponsor?

A sponsor of literacy, according to Deborah Brandt, according to me, is an influencing factor, for better or worse, on a person's ability to read and write.
Everyone else is still typing so I'm going to elaborate on that:
 These factors, for the most part, are individuals or organizations that have something to benefit from their influence.  For example, teachers get a paycheck for teaching kids the alphabet.  Libraries stay in existence by loaning out books.  Schools need to prove their kids can read and write in order to get funding.  Companies need to teach their employees their jargon and methods of communication so they can be efficient.  Etc.

Brodkey's Literacy Sponsors Map(ish)

This is sort of like a map...

What were the economic/political conflicts or contexts? 
- "working class white girl"
- she felt some class conflict because of how the middle class was emphasized in all the books she read
- she mentions the prejudice against black people and Catholics very briefly, but she was neither, so that didn't affect her
Who were their sponsors? 
- her family, who allowed her to be constantly reading instead of doing chores
- her local library, who let her read the adult books after she'd gone through all the ones for kids
- her teacher who would punish her for reading ahead in the books for class
- her school that put her on the college track without really asking
- her neighbors who let her interview them for the "census" she took as a child
What literacies were valued? 
- Academic, by her school
- grammatical, she recalls being obsessed with grammar rules while learning to write
- a social-centered writing, like when she took her "census". No one instructed her to do that, she just did it because it was enjoyable, and she enjoyed interacting with her neighbors
How was it learned? 
- most of her learning was done in the school, where she learned strict rules of grammar, not to read ahead, and learned the formulaic "inverted pyramid" style of essay writing
What resources were available? Who provided these resources? How difficult was it to access these resources?
- her library was a community-provided establishment, and she seemed to have no trouble accessing it because she read so much.
- her school system, was a community-provided establishment, and she had to access it. She was put on the college track and no one really asked her about it.

Response to "Sponsors of Literacy"

Brandt defines a sponsor of literacy as things that "enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way."  I had never thought of a "sponsor" being something that would work against what is being sponsored.  Sounds like a sponsor is something with authoritative influence in a certain area.
The example that I thought was most interesting was Dora Lopez, who had a ridiculously limited access to things in Spanish.  Driving 70 miles for newspapers?  I guess that's what happens when you live in the Midwest.  It had never occurred to me that things are probably pretty hard if you don't know English in this country.  We don't officially have a national language, but, practically, it's English.
I guess my sponsors of literacy would be my parents, the NYS public school system, and the local library.  I got read to before bed, read a lot of the young adult section of the library, and obviously had to read and write all kinds of stuff  in school (okay, that's a lie, I wrote the same academic, five paragraph, boring-as-boiled-chicken essay that everyone else did).  I guess school also suppressed some literacy there, because I wish I had been given the chance to write something I was really invested in and that I, frankly, liked.
Another way, and perhaps the most important, that my parents have been literacy sponsors, is that they haven't given me an ounce of trouble about going off into the big bad world as a Writing Major with an English Minor.  I'm not exactly the most sought-after type of employee, but they haven't tried to push me towards anything more financially profitable.

Aria Response

Summary:
A boy growing up in a Spanish-speaking household recalls what it was like to learn English.

Response:
I printed it out the wrong way, and I love masala chai.
Anywho,
What interested me the most was how he differentiated between his public and private lives and how that was intimately tied up with language.   He felt that children shouldn't use their native language in schools because of their native, home language is private and doesn't belong in a public space like school.  Maybe it's because I only speak English, but I just had a hard time connecting with what he was talking about.  Yeah, it's cool to have your own private language at home, but you're going to have a really hard time in school, which is going to affect your grades, which is going to affect the college you may go to, which is going to affect...etc.  I think schools should be as accommodating as possible for the children that attend them.  I think its a form of discrimination if you don't.