The Importance Of Literacy

When you hear the word literacy, what would you immediately think? While most people would say “language” or “reading and writing,” I have learned over the years that is expands far beyond that. Literacy is a deep understanding - the mastery of a particular skill. For most, it is a mastery of a language, but from moving a vast distance to entirely different education systems, it became clear to me that literacy can take form beyond language skills, but also to test taking skills, and though this truth lead to conflict at first, the combined literacies have made me excel as a student.

Growing up in New York, I cannot really say I did not live with a bit of a silver spoon in my mouth. Since middle school, every classroom I entered was supplied

You really could not have asked much more from a public school. Even the music classes were trying to figure out ways to integrate the excessive technology into their courses. You would think that an area so focused on education would have extensive test preparation and practice testing to keep test scores high, but you would be wrong.

Back home in New York, I had never taken a single practice test, other than the PSAT. The limitation for any state test practice that we did in my old high school was the generic process of elimination technique for multiple choice, or learning not to highlight everything in a reading and how to identify important information. Instead of test prep work, the entire school year would be spent on work specifically for the course at hand, using only the criticisms of our peers and teacher to push our writing into a better direction. Prompts were oftentimes vague, with a common prompt between all novels being “what was one key thematic concept?” With this, we as the students were left with total power over the essay, aiding our growth as writer

Every week was the same routine - Monday, past AP test multiple choice practice, Wednesday, past AP test essay prompt, Thursday, rhetoric term review and practice spotting terms in small excerpts for test practice, and Friday, vocab test and another past AP test essay prompt. It was less than subtle that the teacher strictly wanted to teach us what she could that would apply to the exam, and though I both understand and thank her for that and the 4 I got on the AP Language and Composition exam because of her teaching, it was all a new world to me. Never before had I felt so confined in what I could write, and my wording and syntax were cast into the shadows in favor of focusing solely on the evidence that I listed within papers. Any time I attempted to write just along the boundaries of the prompt to create a more unique, interesting text, I was met only with critique and low essay scores. My grades were dropping to an all new low of B-s, and it tore me up inside. I did not understand why it was that I was doing so poorly compared to the past. Teachers and advisors suggested stress from the new move, but that did not feel like a real answer. It was not until one day that I had no idea what to ride and entirely, for lack of better words, “bullshitted” my assignment that I learned why I did so poorly; essay graders did