Rising Cairn
Sean McCarthy
Narratives I read:
- “Reality Check”
- “Success”
- “A Mother Knows Best”
- “Reading With a Purpose”
- “Writing Development”
- “The Men on Horses”
- “How I overcame one of the Biggest Challenges in my Life”
- “Literacy Narrative (Hannah Metta)”
As I was reading these peoples literacy narratives, I was extremely intrigued. There were various different stories, from a number of different people, but all stories shared a similar theme. All of the narratives I read consist of that specific student having important learning experiences in his or her educational career. In the literacy narrative “Success”, Matt Lorman talks about how he and a friend were assigned a project, and he disliked school projects. But through doing a project he had great interest in, he started to like doing assigned projects more. “Reading With a Purpose” by Justin Augur, tells the story of him disliking reading until one specific book changed his whole outlook on reading. “Writing Development” by Chris Sobral tells a story in which he overcame a big challenge in his life and became a better writer. The students in all of the stories I read employed a growth mindset to overcome a challenge, or an activity they strongly disliked. Through not giving up and telling him or herself they could not do it, they ultimately accomplished their task or goal. Without this growth mindset, none of these students would have overcome their challenges and turned “negatives” into “positives”. After reading these stories, I can infer that reading, writing and learning are not just very important to me, but to other students as well. Also, these stories show that reading and writing is not easy, and we must put in work and motive to get result. Also, as seen in these stories, it is always a huge sigh of relief when one gets where they want to be in their learning career. I should also say that most of these writers felt like they were not where they needed to be with their studies. As a reader I was wondering if these students simply felt like they were not in the discourse. For example Chris Sobral did not feel like he was in the reading and writing discourse and therefore just felt out of place. And throughout reading, I was wondering what these students would do to get in the correct discourse and most of their stories were highly intriguing.
