Because I am an English teacher, I am always intrigued by students’ stories of how they came to reading and writing, the beginnings of their path to literacy and their connection (or disconnection) from the educational system which they must navigate. No one student’s path is the same as any other’s; reading the diversity of their experiences of success and defeat, struggle and triumph, never gets old for me, and I find that knowing their literacy stories helps me understand better how to teach them and help them navigate the path to their educational goals. So when I read "Superman and Me," the literacy narrative of one of my favorite writers, Sherman Alexie, I was hooked. In this essay, which was first published in the Los Angeles Times
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He uses the paragraph—“a fence around words”(1)—to make sense of himself, his family members, his home, the Spokane Indian reservation and the United States. He links his early literacy to his love for his father, an underemployed “avid reader” who is “one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose” (1), underscoring his own choice to strive for a better education. The second part of the essay is Alexie’s description of how much of a challenge it was to continue to demand more for himself in the reservation school, how he was labeled an “oddity” and “widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike” for “refus[ing] to fail” (2). He closes the essay by telling readers how he now, as a writer and teacher, visits reservation schools across the country in order to inspire and ignite a love of learning, of books, in the Indian children he meets. This is a life purpose and a calling for him; he ends the essay with this evocative sentence: “I am trying to save our lives” …show more content…
His story is first and foremost about children, a topic readers almost universally view with sympathy. The children in his story are being treated unfairly, being condemned by expectations of stupidity stemming from racial stereotypes. He writes, “As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world” (2). For those readers who share his belief that education is a right for all children, it is difficult to read his description of the reservation school classrooms and the way in which the fire within him, his love of learning and his desire to excel, might so easily have been extinguished. He concludes the first half by telling the reader that recounting his own childhood causes him pain. He also uses love and family to help connect with readers. He spends the first three paragraphs writing about his family, especially his father, and ends with a sentence that arrested this reader: "My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well" (1). As I read this sentence, I had a sudden memory of my grade school self, waking and wandering in the middle of the night, and finding my insomniac, book-loving mother, sitting in the black Naugahyde chair tucked into the corner of our living room, chain smoking, a glass of Tab and rum next to three or four library books, reading, always reading. Alexie captured in that moment for me why I, too,
He uses the paragraph—“a fence around words”(1)—to make sense of himself, his family members, his home, the Spokane Indian reservation and the United States. He links his early literacy to his love for his father, an underemployed “avid reader” who is “one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose” (1), underscoring his own choice to strive for a better education. The second part of the essay is Alexie’s description of how much of a challenge it was to continue to demand more for himself in the reservation school, how he was labeled an “oddity” and “widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike” for “refus[ing] to fail” (2). He closes the essay by telling readers how he now, as a writer and teacher, visits reservation schools across the country in order to inspire and ignite a love of learning, of books, in the Indian children he meets. This is a life purpose and a calling for him; he ends the essay with this evocative sentence: “I am trying to save our lives” …show more content…
His story is first and foremost about children, a topic readers almost universally view with sympathy. The children in his story are being treated unfairly, being condemned by expectations of stupidity stemming from racial stereotypes. He writes, “As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world” (2). For those readers who share his belief that education is a right for all children, it is difficult to read his description of the reservation school classrooms and the way in which the fire within him, his love of learning and his desire to excel, might so easily have been extinguished. He concludes the first half by telling the reader that recounting his own childhood causes him pain. He also uses love and family to help connect with readers. He spends the first three paragraphs writing about his family, especially his father, and ends with a sentence that arrested this reader: "My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well" (1). As I read this sentence, I had a sudden memory of my grade school self, waking and wandering in the middle of the night, and finding my insomniac, book-loving mother, sitting in the black Naugahyde chair tucked into the corner of our living room, chain smoking, a glass of Tab and rum next to three or four library books, reading, always reading. Alexie captured in that moment for me why I, too,