Literacy
Reading is a significant part of my identity. I have always loved the company of books.
It started with family trips to the library on Friday nights and was nurtured by books for birthday and Christmas gifts. At first, I wanted to be the characters I read about - the Famous Five and Trixie Belden.
Later I discovered that I could imagine what it would be like to be an orphaned princess or to be one of four sisters or to be raised by wolves!
Understanding what you read is the foundation of literacy. It is an essential element of human communication. Being able to read well connects us to other people and their ideas.
I read about Sir Brian Barret Boyes, the NZ heart surgeon long before my son’s life was saved by his pioneering discovery of lowering the baby’s body temperature increased the chances of survival.
I read about June Opie who contracted polio on her OE and how she survived in an iron lung with only one eyelid to communicate by.
I read cyclist Lance Armstrong’s autobiography detailing his heroic recovery from cancer and his triumphant return to the Tour de France, all the way maintaining his stance that he had never failed a drug test. Only one month after I had read his book, he confessed on Oprah Winfrey’s show that he had been a drug cheat for most of his career! After that pack of lies, I had the chance to read Tyler Hamilton’s revealing biography of how he was brought into Lance Armstrong’s world of doping and how they evaded being caught for so long.
Reading both fiction and non-fiction has allowed me to travel to places and time periods to experience lives that are completely different from my own.
● What is it like to be a boy growing up in Afghanistan,
● to be a refugee,
● to be a Jewish person in 1930s Europe,
● to live within a religious cult,
● to dig tunnels under no man’s land at the front lines of a war,
● what to do when you can no longer out-run a forest fire and you have no shelter; ● to be forced in fighting for rebel soldiers;
● to be part of the team that creates the first Oxford English Dictionary but to remain unrecognised for your contribution because you are female…I could keep going for more time than we have and I have not even started on all the fantasy and future worlds…
Literacy is a skill for life. When you don’t read, you are missing out. You become disconnected from what is going on in society. You miss out on opportunities. Your world is diminished because you lack the tools to explore and expand - you are confined to the safety of what you know and what is familiar to you.
Students who struggle with reading and writing tend to experience social isolation and sometimes turn to attention-seeking behaviour to compensate for feelings of being left behind.
Later in life, opportunities for promotion at work are closed to people who do not read or write confidently and so their earning potential becomes restricted. They could find it hard to:
● Read an employment contract
● Understand a tenancy agreement
● Read a job vacancy and its job description
● Understand your prescription medicine
Literacy is a collection of skills that you can learn. Struggling with reading and writing is not a sign that you are thick or unintelligent. There are strategies to help you with the tools for reading and writing but you must practice using them all the time. It would be understandable to avoid something that you find hard to do, but you can improve if you have the determination to stick at it.
So, keep on developing your literacy skills. Pay attention to the ways in which authors use words, sentences and paragraphs. Be a confident user of tools like the Thesaurus and Grammarly. Proofread and edit your writing so that it really does show your understanding. And most of all, keep reading for your pleasure.
Carolyn Fordyce
Deputy Principal