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Receipts and Packaging
My parents have a small general store. Receipts and product packaging are part of my early letter and number literacy. -
Fascination with Cards
I also had an early fascination with small cards like student IDs, Credit card, Insurance cards. I would use cardboard from packaging to make cards to keep in hand crafted cardboard purses. -
Playing School
In kindergarten, my two best friends were both teachers' daughters so a we played school a lot. We would play older grades or high school math with complex looking worksheets. -
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Read at Night
My mother would read to us. My first memories are from before my little sister was old enough to listen. She would read to my brothers Parker and Zane and I from hardbound children's novels published 1960s: Ping and the Peg Leged Pirate of Sulu, Little Pear, there was anther one about a boy who went to music auditions but could not go without his teddy bear. Later, when Varanya was older she would read Harry Potter but by then Parker had stopped listening. -
Catchig Up
My “basic literacy” development was very slow and delayed but accelerated over the summer of 1996 and I entered the 6th grade as an avid reader. My “intermediate literacy” soon caught up. In high school I developed “disciplinary literacy' in literature. I enjoyed reading my geometry and social studies textbooks but my instruction was not balanced. -
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Keep a Journal!
My father would and still does lecture my mother, my siblings and myself on the importance of keeping a journal as a narrative record of business and life events. None of use do this well, not excluding my father, but I started keeping a diary in the fifth grade and stopped during my freshman year of college. -
Novels for Cultural Relavance
I started reading Harry Potter novels then and since then have tried to maintain interest in phenomena of popular books: Twilight, Eragon, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, Percy Jackson and the Olympians(not worth it for cultural relevance nor personal interest) -
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The Bookstore on Maui
In high school, I was on sports teams and we traveled to Maui to compete. After meets, to kill tie, we would end up at this strip mall with a Starbucks and a books store to kill time. It was an opportunity to buy at least one cheaply bound book that I had hear of but knew nothing about: The Hobbit, Jane Eyre, Of Human Bondage, To Kill a Mockingbird. -
Introduction to College Writing
In the of 2003 I took Introduction to College Writing with Dr. John Bean (current co-author of the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing) and learned to rhetorically read advertizements. -
Literate in French
In the Fall of 2006 I read a play by Albert Camus in French-- for fun. I did look up words and phrases but more or less understood what was written in context. This I mark as the short period in which I was literate in French. -
Reading the Wrong Books about Teaching
In the Spring of 2008, I learned of a teaching vacancy in my home town so I checked out books on teaching from the Seattle Public Library. They were the wrong books but they introduced some of the domain specific vocabulary and concepts that would be helpful during my first round of on-the-job training. -
HICPS III
From September of 2008 through May of 2009 I taught 6th grade English, Health and Computers in a Hawaii public school. I gained some literacy in standards documents and educational literature. -
Reading to Build a Dream
Starting in Korea, living in our shoebox apartment, and ending when we bought our land outside of Ellensburg, Washington, Chad and I would read about topics that would best fall under the unifying topic of homesteading: gardening, perma-culture concepts, wild crafting (gathering potent plants), home remedies, animal husbandry, small spaces animal husbandry, alternative building techniques, cheese making and other at home micro-biology. We read websites of all sorts, we read e-books and library -
Read Like A Moddern Teacher
Currently, I can read the Common Core State Standards and plans and modules aligned to them and understand what is intended. I can even read a Common Core based rubric written by an educational consultant and understand how to apply it to my students writing. Currently I can read a student’s individual education plans and understand how I am meant to accommodate their disability in my classroom.