As you look ahead to your literacy narrative, consider how “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life” demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. Together, David Sedaris‘s essay and Helen Keller’s chapter show us that the stories we recount–for our purposes, ones of learning to read or write, or speak a second language–may be humorous or serious and may consist primarily of scene or may be composed of roughly equal parts scene and summary.
Also, Sedaris’s and Keller’s stories show us two narrators whose temporal distance from their narratives differ significantly. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Sedaris recounts struggling to learn French “[a]t the age of forty-one” (166). His essay was published in Esquire magazine when he was forty-three, which means that he was chronicling an experience only two years in his past. In contrast, Keller writes of the life-altering experience of learning sign lanaguage “three months before I was seven years old” (par. 1), more than fifteen years before she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903). The term for a narrator such as Keller is adult retrospective narrator.
As an adult, Keller places the reader in the world of darkness she inhabited as a young child, but that childhood experience is informed by her adult perspective: “I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it [the arrival of my teacher] connects” (par. 1). Keller depicts herself as a girl of almost seven, learning her first sign-language words from Annie Sullivan, but Keller’s observations about that experience are ones that could only come from an adult.
Sometimes students choose not to write about experiences in the distant past because they don’t think they remember enough about incidents that occurred long ago. Know that the more you write about a memory, the more likely you are recall sensory details that pull you back to that moment–and those same sensory details will place readers in that moment with you when you recreate it on the page. Also know that what you don’t remember can become part of your story, just as what Keller doesn’t remember becomes part of her story in these lines: “I learned a great many new words that day. I don’t remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them” (par. 9).
Works Cited
Keller, Helen. “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. Pine Valley Central School, https://www.pval.org/cms/lib/ NY19000481/Centricity/ Domain/105/The%20Day%20Language%20Came%20into%20my%20Life.pdf.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
Tomorrow, at the beginning of class, I will collect your worksheets for the first Check, Please! lesson. If you were absent on the day that I distributed copies of the worksheet or you have misplaced your copy, download the file from Blackboard and print it.
My sample assignment for lesson one appears below, as well as on the worksheet, itself.
Check, Please! Lesson One
In the first lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at Washington State University’s Center for an Informed Public, introduces the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson one is what the author terms the “Wikipedia Trick.” Deleting everything that follows a website’s URL (including the slash), adding a space, typing “Wikipedia,” and hitting “enter” will yield the site’s Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia entry that appears at the top of the screen may indicate the source’s reliability or lack thereof.
The most memorable segment of lesson one is the short, riveting video “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof,” which begins with the narrator asking the question, “How does a child become a killer?” Produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it documents how algorithms can lead unskilled web searchers down paths of disinformation. In the worst cases, such as Roof’s, algorithms can lead searchers to the extremist propaganda of radical conspiracy theorists.
Work Cited
Caulfield, Mike. Check, Please! Starter Course, 2021, https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/updated-resources-for-2021/.
Check, Please! worksheets are designed to be handwritten, and I prefer for you to complete them by putting pen to paper. If, however, you wish to type them, you are required to follow MLA style manuscript guidelines. See the sample file posted in the Check, Please! folder on Blackboard.
Next Up
Tomorrow’s class will be devoted to planning and drafting your literacy narratives. Next Wednesday, January 29, I will return your handwritten drafts with my notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising your narratives on your laptops and tablets. After that class, you will have an additional week to continue your revision work. The due date for posting your revisions to Blackboard and to your WordPress blogs is Wednesday, February 5 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 7 (before class).
Jane Lucas 