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Styllez Ferguson
Ms. Grant
UWRT 1103
September 2, 2014
Vignette 1
The earliest memory I have of my literacy journey is when I was around 4 years old. I
was drawing on my Magna Doodle, which is one of the best toys I ever had. My dad was sitting
in the room with me while I tried to draw numbers on it. After I finished each number I showed
it to him for his approval. Most numbers were drawn correctly but some were terrible. For those,
he would draw himself and I attempted to mimic his hand movements to get the right design of
the number.
My mom taught me my alphabets. They were difficult to memorize but I eventually got
them. I remember reciting my alphabets to my parents multiple times until I got it right. The
Magna Doodle came in handy as well, with its magnetic eraser that you could swipe across the
screen to easily erase a mistake. I would draw the alphabets on the screen the same way I drew
the numbers. My mom also taught me how to spell my name, which gave me a clearer idea of
how the alphabets sounded. After I learned to spell my name attempted spelling other easy
words. One of the first words I remember learning to spell is the color red.
Being literate with my alphabets and numbers gave me confidence when I started school.
Some of the kids couldnt even count to ten. I was considered one of the smart kids and my
teachers praised me. In kindergarten all we really learned was our alphabets and numbers
anyway. So in retrospect, I guess you could say that my mom and dad were my kindergarten
teachers. The foundation of knowledge I got from them helped me finish school and go on to
college.
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Vignette 2
Video games have always been a part of my life. My oldest brother, who is 15 years older
than me, still plays video games and was playing them when I was a baby. The first games I
remember seeing him play were Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Super Mario. I was
fascinated by how much fun they, he and my other older brother, were having and I wanted to
join. A whole new world was about to open up for me, and I wasnt ready for it.
The first few times my brothers let me play video games were very difficult. I didnt
know what buttons to press or how to make the characters move. I couldnt perform any combos
or fatalities in Mortal Kombat and I didnt know any combos in Street Fighter. Super Mario 64, a
platform game, was impossible for me to play. The game was 3-D so the player has to control the
camera and Mario at the same time. My small hands just made things worse. The Nintendo 64
controller is pretty bulky, but the SNES controller is slimmer. Both were difficult for me to
handle. While youre supposed to hold controllers with both hands and let your fingers press the
buttons, I was holding them with my left hand and bashing the buttons with my right.
But I persevered and I watched my older brother, the one thats 3 years older than me,
play these arduous games. After a few years, my hands got bigger and I became more literate
with video games. I noticed that most video games have the same controls for similar actions.
Like in Mario and Mortal Kombat, for example, the button for jump is A and to attack is B
in both of these games. Along with this new knowledge, I also started making progress in these
video games. I learned some combos in Mortal Kombat, I made it to the last boss in Street
Fighter, and I made it to the first Bowser in Mario. Each time I completed one of these feats, it
felt like a huge accomplishment. I still watched my older brother play games, aspiring to be as
good as he was. We played together a lot of times too, but he beat me easily. The competition
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between the two of us motivated me to become better than he was and beat him the way he beat
me.
After several more years of experience, we got a Playstation 3. The controller felt
awesome in my hands and was perfect for me. I began to play games online, like Call of Duty.
This allowed me to match up with players all over the world. Most of the players were great at
these games and playing against them helped me become as good as I am today. Now I guess
you could say the tables have turned, because Im better than my brother at video games and now
he watches me play instead of vice-versa.
Vignette 3
In August 2011, I started my 11
th
grade year. I was only a year away from my senior year
so I was very excited. During the first semester, most of the classes on my schedule looked either
fun or easy, for me at least. The only class that I wasnt prepared for was AP English III. This
was the first AP class I ever took in high school and, besides Calculus, was the hardest. I started
off the class in an awful way, there was a summer reading assignment that I was unaware of.
Throughout the semester, we had to read books and write papers on them. The papers
were graded on a scale of 1-6, most of the time I got a 3 or 4. We read about seven books that
year, but the only ones I can remember were The Great Gatsby, and Alas, Babylon. Reading
these books and writing the papers took my literacy to a new level. In some books, the diction
was hard to follow because they were written a long time ago. After a while I got more and more
comfortable reading this kind of dialect.
What affected my literacy the most in this class was the papers we had to write. This was
an advanced class so you had to be rigorous with your writing just to receive a decent grade. At
the beginning of the year, I wasnt getting the kind of grades I wanted, so I started asking my
teacher, Ms. Hunter, how I could improve. One of the things she told me was to use a larger
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vocabulary when writing. After she told me this, I started searching the internet to find synonyms
for words that I used often. It worked, and my grades started to improve on my papers. I also
started to get better at writing in general. What would have taken me hours to write about in the
past, started to come to me naturally.
Later in the year we all had to give a presentation on a topic of our choice as part of our
Junior Project. It was imperative that we properly prepare for this, which is why we were given a
month to work on it. I didnt start working on it until the day before we had to present, and thats
why it turned out so terribly. One by one, I watched my peers present their powerpoints in a
professional manner. I was one of the last ones to go, which gave me time to go over what I was
going to say. That didnt work, because when it was my turn I immediately started stumbling
over words as I showed the poor class my shameful powerpoint. At the end of our presentations,
we had to answer any questions anyone had about our presentation. The only question I got after
mine was from my teacher. In front of the entire class, she asked me how much time I spent on
it. My instincts told me lie to her, so I told her a week. Of course I failed and I almost failed the
class.
That embarrassing moment wasnt all bad. In the process, I learned what not to do when
you have to give a presentation. Also, seeing the other students present, I got some tips on how
to speak and how to move while presenting. They clearly got their points across to the class and
their powerpoints were easy to follow. Our teacher gave us a lot of advice on what to do to be
successful in presenting. One thing I remember her telling us is to dress professionally, which is
another thing that I didnt do, but I will in the future.
Vignette 4
In 3
rd
grade, my teacher, Ms. Hale, made us write the Star Spangled Banner in cursive.
Not only did this make me memorize the words to our national anthem, it also improved my
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cursive writing. We were just starting to learn how to write cursive at the time, so I believe this
was a good idea. In the end, my cursive was impeccable and, for some time, I actually started
doing all of my assignments in cursive. This was an important step for my literacy journey,
because knowing how to read and write cursive is a norm in society. It also makes you seem
more sophisticated.