Did you Know that Literacy can also be Social?

Have you ever thought about what role literacy plays in your life? How it might even be a driving force that progresses you through life. These thoughts to me were expanded during the interview that I had with one of my friends, Benjamin Hutton. During the interview initially these thoughts didn't cross my mind, but as we progressed into other topics, I started to notice a trend. That trend was that, literacy, is also a social aspect and without us even paying attention to it, it’s become one of the things we use every day. I introduced him to the idea that Literacy and the ability to be literate, expanded to more than just ones understanding and comprehension of reading and writing. With that in mind I raked his Brain to see what thoughts and memories I could try and evoke to understand how, Ben, uses literacy in his everyday life.

A little background information about Ben is that he is a native Washingtonian. He loves any food that tastes good, or just food in general. His interests include anything involving Science, he is currently taking Chemistry, and Psychology and is loving both of those classes. His overall goal for the future is to go into designing, or developing a neurological enhancement, which is one of the reasons that he’s is planning on double majoring in both Computer sciences and Behavioral Neuroscience. But besides that, he is also an extremely funny person, and jokes anytime that he can, which is all the time.

So, when I asked Ben what he associates literacy with he stated that when he hears the word “literacy” he thinks of Libraries.

This phrase made me start to understand how he thinks and understands specific topics. Since he’s planning on going into something dealing with Computer science and Behavioral neuroscience, that is a specific “niche” if you will, using terminology and slang related to that subject that observers not in that field would understand. Even though I’m going into the science field, there are still things that he can talk about that I don’t understand. For example, I didn't know you could have neural implants, I didn't even know what that was or that it was an actual thing. We even emphasized this in more laymen's terms by talking about literacy's role in sports teams, Video games, and even with the reference to a few of his friend groups.

For example, we talked about what is favorite personality trait was, and his response was interesting. He stated:

By understanding how he separates and is flexible with each and every personality he encounters, gave me a mental picture of how a computer analyzes information, places that information into a data bank, and then when appropriate the information can be retrieved. This is kind of like how in each of your friend groups that you have, there is some sort of an inside joke or something only those people will understand. So, each time he has a talk with one of his friends but then meets up with another friend, he alters the way he perceives that persons personal “literacy” or the groups version of literacy.

When I asked him about one of the biggest challenges that he’s had to overcome he talked about how the first finals week that he had to deal with in running start. He was talking about how it was stressful because it was his first run through dealing with college courses, and you know Adulting.

Hearing him explain this, it was very relatable. When he was talking about this he was serious but in the end he said during that time it might have been hard for him, but looking back at it, he’s glad he had to deal with that and he’s pretty happy where he is now. He said it prepared him in a way that he feels high school couldn't have. He even stated that if he had to choose a life motto it would be “prep for the future”, explaining further that

Overall this experience for him has led him to college and give him an edge by having already taken college courses. You could even go as far to say that in some cases compared to regular high school students, he was already literate in college.

He is also very thankful for his extremely close group of friends that he has. He met them at the beginning of fall quarter, by being apart of the “Helps” group. Which helped people move into their dorm rooms.

In some ways I wish I had known about this program, because that is one way that makes adjustment to new places easier is meeting people dealing with the exact same thing. By hearing him talk about all of this made me look back at the last few months and realize how my literacy has even changed from the start of college to now. And if there is anything that I want someone to take from this article it’s that we use literacy every day to understand life, and that our forms of literacy are always changing. One thought from Ben for you to consider.

You can either interpret this in either a serious fashion by considering the fact by struggling each day to get to your end goal and achieve your dream if you suck it up by eating the “bad food”. Or consider this to be funny, but in the end it’s how you use your own form of literacy.

Related posts:

Have you ever encountered having some legacy and long R scripts, which you need to integrate with other codes (e.g. Python) to make a complete workflow? This is especially true in data engineering…

The changes to Digital University (DU) were more than just updating a logo and some of the website. The rebrand and redesign were carefully planned and tested over time to make sure we are delivering…