Letter to Younger Self

Dear younger Rebecca Christie,

One big mistake you are going to make is not getting your license right away. I am writing this letter to prevent this mistake from happening. It is very important that you listen to me and not just shrug it off. First, you need to take the first Driver’s Ed course as soon as you can. Next, you need to practice driving with mom. After that you need to get your permit. Once you have your permit make sure you continue to practice. Next, you need to take the second course as soon as you can. After you have finished taken the last course practice until you and mom feel you are ready to take the test. Finally, take the test and make sure you study for it. Once you turn 16 you will get your license and you will be more free and independent. Don’t forget to also concentrate at school as well. I am now in college and mom and dad are still driving me. I am a commuter and it is a pain that I have to be driven everywhere by my parents. Also I always have to ask friends to drive me when we get together. If you start it early and continue to practice you will be able to drive yourself to college instead of having to be driven by mom and her schedule dominating your college life. Make sure you ask mom to go out to practice driving more often because that will convince her that you are ready to take the final test. Don’t worry about school; you will have plenty of time to get everything done. Also, you will be able to drive yourself to school your senior year of high school. This mistake will affect your life dramatically in ways you don’t even realize yet. This issue affects not only you; it also affects mom and dad (our parents). Think about all the time and energy they suffer by having to drive you everywhere when you are supposed to be able to drive yourself. If you show you want to learn to drive and get your license, mom and dad will see you as more responsible and will respect you more. Trust between you and our parents will be stronger and better. If you have your license you will have more of the freedom that you want. Treat this process as serious as you do school because this will be a very important step for you. Just remember what I said which is to start training early and follow through with hard work and determination. Everything will be all right. You can do this and you deserve to be independent, happy, and free. Please listen to me because I know you will be happier in the long run if you do what I say. This is very important and you need to know that it will make life easier as well.    

From someone who is smarter then you,

Older Rebecca Christie

Reflective piece

I decided on my specific ad by picking something that I knew and by looking at how I could redesign it. If it was too hard to design I would move on to a different ad. The product had to be something I was familiar with so that it would look like an ad the company would make. I came up with the idea in my mind. I knew from seeing them on TV and magazines that Campbell’s soup ads usually are targeted towards children and adult with young children. I figured the middle aged adult would be a good new audience because it hadn’t been done by them before. One challenge I had was designing an ad for an audience that I could not relate to. I overcame this by putting the typical items of dinner and making dinner in the ad. I liked this paper and definitely used what I liked to my advantage. I liked the fact that we had a chance to be creative without having to do something like draw a picture. I used this by coming up with a great idea and almost making a story out of it.  I learn and understand some things now that I have done this essay. I feel like I understand the appeals better (logos, ethos, pathos). I also understand now how advertisements use these to get their message or product to a certain audience. If I got a second chance to write this essay I think I would take more time to edit my paper. I would also take more time to make sure I knew what the appeals were and how they applied to my paper.

Process Memo Rebecca Christie

Rebecca Christie

Wrt 150

Mrs.Rinke

10/12/12

Process memo

Reflecting on a piece of my own writing is a brand new experience. Usually, once a piece of work is turned in, it is erased from my brain in a “whew, it’s over” moment. For this three part assignment, I knew instantly that the paper’s theme would be my struggle. My challenge would be to convey this to my audience without pity all the while demonstrating that literacy is a lifelong journey. I found the entire process to be both challenging and fulfilling. Challenging because I still have anxiety about my writing capabilities especially now that I am in college and fulfilling because my teacher actually acknowledged my idea as worthwhile both through discussion and my final grade on the assignment. Two things came out of my reflection on this three part assignment. One is that even though I have learned to write for me and my pleasure, it still matters to me what others think of my writing, and two, I will continue to feel angst and pressure and insecurities along my literary journey forever. 

The timeline was an easy place to start. Chronologically, I could look back on my elementary school years as filled with angst and frustration. I could have easily included the endless hours reading out loud to my parents, the tutors, the after school sessions only to have made my audience bored. Those details are still fresh and indelible in my brain. It amazed me how easily all those emotions came flooding back. Old wounds are not easily healed. On the other hand, I didn’t want to omit these times from the narrative entirely. So, I chose to briefly state that I was diagnosed with a speech and language delay and Attention Deficit Disorder. I did not want to go into technical jargon that only a psychology major would appreciate. The theme of my struggle would be woven throughout the paper, with another theme of achievement and success and the self-confidence that I gained from these struggles as I took many small steps toward literacy. The timeline became how I chose to arrange my paper and kept me from writing too much on any one year or any specific incident.

Focusing on the overall feeling of the paper helped me with the writing process. Since I knew from the beginning that I wanted my paper’s theme to be struggle and success, I had to show both parts of the equation. There were two parts to my struggle – the technical part and the emotional part. The technical part was my speech and language issue and my attention deficit disorder. The emotional part was being made fun of and a lack of self confidence. Likewise, there were two parts to my success - the literary part and the emotional part.  The literary part was the speaking, reading and writing accomplishments. The emotional parts were the gains in self esteem and achievements in school. Actually, physically making a list of these and having it near me while creating my rough draft helped me organize my thoughts and keep on task. I found that I could easily ramble on in my paper about my life and experiences. While editing, I decided it was best to state my thoughts and actions and move on. This is where my peer review came in handy. My two peers both stated in their reviews that my story was compelling and interesting and that relieved me. That was most important to me. However, there is always one problem with peer review.  Allowing a peer to review your work opens it up – revealing parts of me to strangers and being judged.  Reflecting on this is when I realized my chronic insecurities.  

 Up until this point, I had not transitioned from the narrative to the slideshow. When I did, I discovered a problem. The aim of my paper was to convey to the reader my struggle, but visually I could never show that. There are no pictures of me crying while trying to read or me with my first grade tutor. So, airing my dirty little secrets on paper was one thing, but putting pictures and music behind it was another.  I chose to keep it simple. Use phrases instead of sentences and keep it light hearted.  The pictures that I selected were personal and showed me as a cute happy kid or me today. My other pictures complimented my story and were designated highlights from my narrative and I chose them because they were examples of pieces that assisted me throughout my journey toward literacy. My instrumental musical choice was one that I selected based on its title.  “Butterfly” could describe my literary journey.  My expression and creativity was bottled up inside like a beautiful butterfly waiting to escape from its tightly wrapped cocoon. Looking back upon the peer review, I found that I only used some of their suggestions. Upon reflection, I may have had a preconceived notion of the direction I wished my slideshow to take.  Once I read the comments of others about my finished product, I could draw further conclusions. I am glad that my theme of struggle and success came across in both the narrative and the slideshow. I may be should have included a few more slides just so that one idea flowed into another like stepping stones on a path. While the path seemed clear to me, it clearly wasn’t to the observer and that was a problem. My intent to keep the phrases short was meant to make things clean and precise but, in fact ended up having the opposite effect. Because this was the first time that I had ever used “Animoto”, I was unfamiliar and unsure about it. Next time, I intend to take extra consideration to how the viewer may respond and react. What I learned most was that because it’s my story, I know it. But an outsider does not. I need to make sure the slideshow can be understood from an outsider’s perspective.

Writing this narrative about my literary struggle was an interesting project. It was enlightening to me from both a writer’s perspective and a personal one. Deciding the theme and going through the creative process was easy, but opening up about me to others was not and neither was allowing my writing to be critiqued. A student writer embarks on a literary journey and finds that it parallels their life. I wanted to show I could write despite my slow start. I wanted to demonstrate my new found confidence in my literary skills. What I found was that I have made many strides, but I still have a long way to go. The journey never ends. 

Visual Arguement

The Nissan Leaf car is trying to appeal to the animal lovers and environment friendly audience. Everybody has heard about global warming and that the ice caps are melting. They show this to the extreme with the polar bear swimming in high waters and being in an environment it shouldn’t be. I personally take the oppositional view on this commercial. First, my dad works for a company that sells decal parts to the American car companies. Nissan is not one of those companies. Second, I know from what my dad tells me that electric and/or hybrid cars don’t sell and do well. Lastly, global warming which is the issue they portray in the commercial is a very controversial topic. I personally don’t think that man is responsible for global warming or the fact that the ice caps are melting. A lot of the animal lovers and environment friendly people might see that commercial and think that the car is a good investment and idea. I know from what my dad says that making those kinds of cars is more expensive and that they are not selling very well. This means that car companies are losing money because they are making these cars. I would not buy this car because the commercial unrealistically portrays the polar bear being in cities and towns like ours because it has nowhere to go. This is very unlikely due to the fact that the polar bear couldn’t survive in the conditions we live in even if it was winter (it didn’t look like winter in the commercial). In all I feel that this commercial was ineffective on me.    

Digital Literacy in my Own Words

I agree with the last comment for Dustin Anderson’s piece. "The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web, where they should regularly be aiming, from grade-school on, to contribute to a wide range of wiki projects."(Anderson) I was not really taught about using the computer till in middle school and even then that was minimal. In high school my range was broadened but, only to a certain extent. There was no blog, Moodle, or animoto instruction at all. The instruction they did give to me was very limited. I barely know how to use an online database and the only online tool that I got to use was Prezi. When I came here to college I had to basically teach myself how to use all these other kinds of programs that we were expected to know already. High school only prepares you for writing by drilling into your brain the MLA format saying that you have to follow this in college. Never had I heard the term digital literacy used before. The teachers completely ignored that part of the subject. I now think of digital literacy as basically anything you read and write that you see through a screen. Blogs, emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are just a few examples of this. I feel that in at least middle and high school they should better prepare us for this new digital world. They should explore more digital options that will make it easier for high school graduates to transition into their new college life. This is already happening for some elementary schools have Smart Boards in all their classrooms. This is a step forward in which should continue and be spread throughout all schools and areas. In all digital literacy should be more thoroughly taught and earlier.      

Literacy timeline

4 years old- spoke my first word

·         Elementary school= Dad reads books to me and my sister, I read books in morning as my mom helps me get ready

·         Not a big book reader

·         Speech and Language therapy

·         Dr.Suess and picture books were the first books that I read which helped me develop my skills

·         Father loves  historical/factual books, mother doesn’t like books, older sister likes all kinds of  books

·         Slow reader and difficulty understanding made it hard to read and write

·         Television, movies were more my passion.

·         Horrible handwriting which many people couldn’t read discouraged me from writing

·         Middle school= typing class was slow when everyone was fast

·         Mysteries (Nancy drew, Agatha Christie) were the only kind of stories that I enjoyed reading

·         High school= started reading sci-fi and fantasy books, combination of romance and different people made me feel better that I wasn’t like everybody else.

·         Get involved in series and get consumed by them.

·         Would make up stories in my head based on other books I read, T.V shows I watched, and things that happened to me

·         Would sometimes write them down

·         Reading and writing was/is an escape from my life especially when life would get hard

·         Father jokes I might become a writer when I am older.

·         The more I read and write the better I felt about my literacy and myself

·         Got a Kindle in the middle of high school. It made me read more(don’t know why) 

·         Now can’t wait for the next book that I am going to read to come out