Introduction

 

                     Conventional wisdom and considerable research holds that girls, especially girls in the elementary school setting, rather far outperform their male classmates in all facets of academic endeavours, but more so in the spheres of reading, writing, and other exertions commonly associated with literacy.(Knowles, E., and Smith, M. 2005) Some thinkers explain this anomaly through multifaceted sociocultural and educational perspectives which, among other things, focus on familial backgrounds as well as on classroom dynamics between teachers and learners and on standardized test results.(Maynard 2002)

                    The explanation proferred and seen most frequently, however, arises out of the perceived position of males in discrete cultural settings and out of their acute sense of what is proper self-image and identity. Cultural norms of behavior teach boys that the foremost goal of male existence is to attain masculinity and that the socially correct way of doing so is through nonacademic pursuits such as sports, fighting, watching aggressive cartoons, violent movies, and cinematic productions of sexual encounters in which the man is the aggressor. According to one author, "real men...have better things to do than to read or write." (Newkirk 2002) The sociocultural education of boys therefore de-emphasizes scholasticity, study, and traditional academic learning.( Pollack and Cushman, 2002) That same culture, however, urges girls to seek feminity through domesticity, marriage, childrearing, and school performance. Literacy in the elementary school milieu becomes a socially, inappropriate male objective .(Newkirk 20020

                       This seminar paper challenges the idea of feminine superiority in literacy, especially the argument put forth by some that girls outperform boys in literacy pursuits in any and all contexts. Instead, the paper contends that the literacy and educational strengths of boys and girls are created not just by gender but by the entirety of the sociocultural influences that affect them, and that, given particularized scenarios, boys in discrete circumstances may perform on the same level as girls if not surpass them.. Anecdotal, autobiographical, and research based qualitative resources form the basis of the tentative conclusions reached here. I will state here, and in subsequent sections of this seminar paper, that in the elementary school I attended, an urban based Roman Catholic parochial institution located in a near totally white area in Chicago in the 1960s, that male students, including myself, outpaced the girls in all features of learning, including literacy.

 

                    In the paper, I will outline my ideas for my own performance in grammar school vis-vis the female students, and for why, in certain religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic classes, that boys may perform equally or better than girls. I observe, and draw great signifance from, the anomaly that all of my teachers, including the principal , assistant principal, and substitute teachers, shared with each other the exact same cultural and gender trait; they were all Sisters, or nuns, in the Catholic religious order called the Sisters of St. Joseph, and they were all women. In my particular case, and I believe that this would be at least partially, if not wholly true, in other households in my neighborhood matching my cultural characteristics, this all female sponsored education was duplicated in the home, where my mother and grandmother, who themselves were highly literate models, served as part-time domestic teachers.

 

                    From the research and personal relevant experience, I develop here a sociocultural theorom which may explain my performance in elementary school and the literacy dominance of male students over female students in that school. This construct posits that within certain cultures, particularly  white ethnic working class cultures imbued with certain religious tenets about the appropriate role of females, that females in general and female teachers in particular will enjoy a heightened respect and stature from their male charges, and that respect will translate into an opportunity to learn better and therefore academically perform better. This framework therefore stresses the gender of the teacher in explaining male student literacy and educational patterns, as well as religion, class, and other urban based factors. This is not to say that the background of the student becomes irrelevant. On the contrary, for this theory to work, the boys must have a social background similar to the teacher and one which emphasizes that female authority figures do in fact exist.

 

                    A portion of this construct therefore requires an analysis of how the particular social background of a male learner affects his learning and his apparent aptness and keenness to learn from a woman. The paper asserts that, contrary to what is generally understood, Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in particular may in certain instances create situational female role models and female authority over men. In Catholicism, that role model format stems from adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and numerous female saints; Catholic school boys are taught that these women are authority figures and associate, in their minds, the nuns with them .Therefore,male students of Catholic, western European background, may in fact academically flourish in an literacy atmosphere dominated by religious female authority.

                    Organizationally, the body of the paper will begin with a recitation of the facts and evidence. It will then turn to an appraisal of some literacy, educational,and other studies and literature which bear on the question of how I could have outperformed the girls in my elementary school class. Finally, I will offer a few conclusions, one of which is that a key factor in assessing male student performance is the gender of the teacher, which is of especial importance in the social context in which I learned, a context which contained female educational authority figures whose absolute authority flowed from religious considerationsand from the peculiar and discrete sociological context in which I was raised.

 

 

                    In the 1960s, my family lived on the south side of the city of Chicago in an all white, working class ethnic enclave named Bridgeport. Our household consisted of four people- my father, a Chicago police officer, my mother, a housewife, my younger brother, and I. Frequently, that number swelled to five; when my father worked overtime at the police department, a very common occurrence, my widowed immigrant grandmother stepped in and helped my mother with the children and household chores. Of course, it was expected that my grandmother and my mother would assume these purely domestic duties; we were part of an immigrant Italian and Roman Catholic world which emphatically stressed the domestic sphere for the female and frowned upon any activities for her outside of it

 

                    Nonetheless, my mother and grandmother did manage to carve out a niche for themselves as a kind of haven from the more stressful facets of household life and from the male hegemony under which they lived; they read, a kind of literacy to escape social domination. Their reading tastes were rather remarkable;  they read classical American and British authors like Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens, political tracts, the Bible, newspapers and magazines, even though my mother had only a high school education and my grandmother had no formal education at all and spoke English only as a second language. They frequently insisted that my brother and I read along with them. This prospect enticed me, as I had spent some amount of my free time virtually every day watching them read, knowing that the books they read contained stories and other marvels in which I wanted to share. They bought a set of encyclopedias for us and I  scanned them on my own or they read them to me. Through my recognition of countries and places on the maps featured in the encyclopedia, I was able to decode the letters on the maps and from that point forward I recognized the words and knew their meaning. I used this system of linking together the places on the maps with the letters adjoining them to teach myself how to read on a wider basis. Of course, both my mother and grandmother helped this process along, by reading to me even more and having me memorize words and sentences. There came a time in this process that I could read unaided certain books, especially childrens’ elementary books with explanatory or demonstrative pictures. .                                                                                                                    

                       Before I entered elementary school, reading started to become a major source of diversion for me. Alternative pastimes and activities were scant. The school I attended did not have a schoolyard, a gymnasium, nor an athletics program. The nearest public park was six blocks away across two major thoroughfares which could not be crossed without adult supervision. Children on our block were forced by these circumstances to invent games which could be played on the sidewalk or even in the street, which was hazardous at all times but more so in the winter.(One game we played was "penner,"  named after grader Francis Penner, which involved the amount of time one could balance on a window ledge.) Due to the absence of athletics and sports, I had plenty of extra hours on my hands. I spent many of them reading.

                    Church connected activities at our parish Nativity of our Lord represented another diversion for myself and my family :  for me,they were a learning experience and indoctrination in the awe-inspiring symbolism of the Catholic religion.That played a huge role in the develpoment of my literacy, as it emphasized to me the stature, respect, and blind obediance owed to the nuns and priests. Weather permitting, Nativity sponsored an outdoor festival once a week, usually in connection with some important event, such as the founding of the parish or the conquest of the snakes in Ireland by St. Patrick. The nuns used these festive occasions to drive home the overwhelming importance of religion in our lives. For example, even the rides and games all had a religious theme to them. One ride  was "christened" the Holy Ghost roller coaster; another the St. Ignatius bumper cars. The prizes for winning games and contests were all religiously related; crucifixes, candles, and statuettes awaited any winner.

                    Religious observances became a diversion for me too, though for the adults they were a matter of moral imperative. We attended Mass every Sunday, every Holy Day of Obligation, the anniversary of my grandfather’s death, and on the feast day of important Saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Anthony of Padua. Church represented both a joy and a frustration to me; a joy in that I marveled at the sheer sensory excitement of the music,the multicolored paintings on the walls and ceilings, and statues of Jesus and the Apostles; a frustration in that the priests said the Mass in Latin, which I did not understand though I made furious efforts to do so by poring over the Latin missalette. The use of the Latin language gave the Mass and other rituals an aura of holiness,mystery and awe. Fueling that mystery was the statuary which surrounded the Church’s perimeter. A huge marble statue of Mary holding the Infant Jesus dominated the side altar. Surrounding her, were several other statues of assorted male and female saints which were shorter than her. I remember my grandmother saying that these Saints possessed great powers and could even stop a volcanic eruption. It impressed me that our religion had elevated Mary, a woman, to a pedestal above all these Saints, even above Saint Francis or her own husband St. Joseph.

                    The Church operated an elementary school also named Nativity of Our Lord. The Sisters of Saint Joseph, a Roman Catholic religious order designed for women wishing to educate children of the Catholic faith, administered the school and furnished all of the staff; the principal, assistant principle, religious instructors, and teachers. I

attended this school from 1964 to 1972. The population of girls vs. boys in the school slightly favored the girls. In my class,for example, there were 38 girls and 35 boys. The religious faith of students of the school was Roman Catholic. The Sisters enforced this criteria of admission by requiring new parents to produce a certificate of baptism if the prospective student had not been baptized in the parish. Demographically, all of the students in the school were of white, European descent or birth; a sizeable part of the students had ancestors from Ireland, Italy, or Poland.(www.uic.edu/orgs/ Bridgeport Ethnic Villages)

                    In the 1960s, Nativity awarded the best student in each grade a prize for having the highest grades. In my graduating class, from 1964 to 1972, that student was a male. During that same time period, the school gave “runner-up” awards each year to students who had the next highest grades. For an eight year period, the preponderance of the runners up prize went to male students.

                    My class graduated from Nativity in 1972. Of the 68 graduates, only twenty went on to college; seventeen boys, three girls. Twelve of the boys completed college and all of them entered a graduate school of one kind or another. They tended to lean towards the professional schools like law, medicine, or business. The female 1972 graduates all obtained degrees in education and all currently teach in the parochial school system.

                    Using a broader perspective, between 1954 and today, Nativity graduated 17 lawyers, three medical doctors, one dentist, innumerable accountants, teachers, and a psychologist. With the exception of ten of these graduates, all were men. Of particular note, between 1932 and 1989, Nativity graduated five mayors of the city of Chicago, three Clerks of the Circuit Court of Cook County, two State’s Attorneys of Cook County, three State Representatives, three State Senators, numerous judges, including one who became Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, and a member of President Clinton’s Cabinet. That person moved onto to become the Director of Vice-President’s Al Gore’s campaign for the Presidential Election in 2000.(www.uic.edu/orgs/:  the Political History of Bridgeport)

                    The above discussed facts show an unmistakeable pattern of male literacy dominance in the Nativity school in the 1960s, a pattern which conflicts with popularly held beliefs about female literacy and educational performance. This is especially the case if one includes, as I think the literacy literature demands,  the achievement record of Nativity students following their graduation. In assessing the educational and literacy performance of any person or related groups of persons, one must use a wider, decontextualized, perspective, one that considers not only elementary school diagnostic reading tests – which were not utilized in the Archdiocese of Chicago schools until the 1970s anyway – but social, economic, even political achievement. (Street 1993). Literacy, after all, lays the cognitive foundations for the development of the human mind and personality. It affords the individual the opportunity to obtain those mental and personality traits necessary to achieve life-orientated goals, in society, education, religion, politics, and so on. Viewing retrospectively the rather impressive and socially opportunistic careers of so many Nativity graduates, and realizing or appreciating that the common denominator of their success is Nativity, gender, religion, and class, one must deduce that their mastery of literacy on the elementary school level was exceptional and must have surpassed the girls who did not enjoy these kinds of postgraduate success. Why?

                    In the Brian Street argues that literacy analysis must utilize a broad based, anthropological, cross cultural approach, and veer away from the older models of analysis which restricted literacy to an appraisal of reading and writing skills. Street names this approach the “ideological” literacy model. Street says:

                                                                               

                                                                                 “I use the term “ideological” to describe this approach, rather than

                                                                                  less contentious or loaded terms such as “cultural,” “sociological,”or 

                                                                                 “pragmatic” ….. because it signals quite explicitly that literacy pract-

                                                                                  ices are aspects not only of culture but also of power structures.” (Street 1993)

 

Street’s “ideological” approach, in its very essence, champions a re-configuration of the more traditional literacy analytical modes and urges as a substitution a “totality” of the circumstances kind of approach, one that is similar to legal methodology. Street’s thinking demands inclusion of all possible sociocultural factors in any comprehensive literacy analysis, whether of an individual, societies, cultures, or any other groups of people. The list of Street factors is long, but at a minimum they feature race, gender, class, religion, economics, or any other aspect of human existence which could or does shape the person in the development of literacy.

                    Though his analytical emphasis might differ from Street’s, Professor James Paul Gee’s approach spelled out in “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics,” “seconds” as it were,  Street's core idea that literacy analysis should widen to include multiple disciplines and factors. According to Gee, the correct path to defining an useful meaning for literacy lays in the idea of discourse. Gee tells us that “Discourse” (which he spells with a capital) is an “identity kit” which comes “complete with….instructions on how to act, talk, and often write.” ( Gee  1993)The author tells us that two additional methodological constructs divide “Discourse” into two parts – Primary and Secondary Discourse. Human beings acquire their Primary Discourse, which consists of the development of personality traits, socialization, physical and verbal language, through membership in early childhood units such as family, church, friendship circles, and other similar pre-school contacts. Primary discourse influences and develops personality, languages and bilingualism, social skills, gender identification, sexuality, and many more. In Gee’s world, Primary Discourse initiates the process of literacy development; it sets the stage for the development of further and more sophisticated literacy traits as the individual matures.

                    Secondary Discourse, according to Gee, is the socializations and cultural additions engrafted onto a person by school, church, athletics, and friendships made outside of the home. Gee states that in evaluating secondary Discourses, and ultimately in defining literacy itself, one consider a wide and all-encompassing range of social factors.(Gee 1993; Delpit 1995)

                   The lessons of Street and Gee, therefore, is to reject any single theme literacy methodology and instead rely on a totality of relevant circumstances approach, one that strives to explain the development of literacy in any context by taking into account all of the myriad idiosyncratic facts that touch upon and give meaning to a person’s life.and therefore paint his or her literacy. What web of interwoven factors explain my performance in elementary school – a performance that outmatched the records of the female students? What accounts for the extraordinary academic excellence of male students from my school and their apparent use of their achievements to acquire a near monopolistic political dominance on a local level in Chicago for over half a century? Employing the ideological model of Street and the Discourse analysis favored by Gee, I have arrived at the conclusion, a tentative conclusion, that my literacy and the literacy of the other boys of whom I speak, flows directly from a confluence of the Roman Catholic religion, western European ethnicity, working class, and gender influences in which I was raised. To be even more specific, I was taught in grammar school by Roman Catholic nuns. Due to the exalted position of women in the Catholic religion, a religion which emphasizes female authority in certain places such as the home or classroom, I gave my women-nun teachers considerable veneration, respect, and obedience, which, coupled with the literacy traditions I experienced at home and the mandates of our economic class that the key to male upward mobility was literacy and education,fostered a positive learning milieu for males, and in whole or in part explains their success.

                    The crux of my analytical structure is the gender differential between myself and my elementary school instructors, and the influence that religious beliefs had on that set of relationships. It is often believed, as if it were a mathematical equation, that white European ethnic groups, such as the one to which I belong, hold women as a group in low esteem and restrict them to allegedly venial status, forcing them to occupations such as housewifery, cleaning, nursing, and even elementary school teaching. This perspective, however, conflicts with the view of women held by the Catholic religion, a religion which I and the bulk of white ethnic Europeans profess. Unlike Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, the Catholic religion has as a matter of doctrine a female figure of the most high standing: the Virgin Mary . Since the dissemination of the Gospels in the first century A.D., the Catholic faith has taught that Mary is the biological Virgin Mother of God, that she was physically present at the Crucifixation, that she ascended into Heaven chaste and spotless, and that she therefore holds a close relationship with God, so close and central to the major theological beliefs of Catholicism that she herself borders on deification. This scripture generated uniqueness possessed by Mary has been enlarged and amplified over the centuries by Mary apparition sightings all over the map of Europe and by Churchdom’s proclivities to bestow upon her new title after new title, such as Mother of the Church, Queen of the Angels, And Queen of the Universe, just to name a few examples.

                    Within Catholicism, Mary is no longer just  the object of weekly novenas or rosaries. In the words of Father Thomas P. Rausch:

                                                                  

         “From the earliest days of the Christian community the figure of the

             the mother of Jesus has appealed to the imagination of Christians.

                          In the New Testament Mary is often represented as an example of the true

                   Disciple. The frequent references to her in apochryphal writings of the

                         Early centuries testify to the interest her story evoked. An early theological

                                      Tradition saw in her a type of the church…..By the Middle Ages Christians            

                                         began turning Mary into a divine intercessor…and then into a cult.”(Rausch2002)

 

                    The deeply entrenched female worshipping of Roman Catholics does not begin and end with Mary. The Church recognizes a numerous contingent of female Saints who are venerated by Roman Catholics on a widespread basis. A rather significant number of these women are of western European origin, and it is apparent that America-bound immigrants from western Europe transported their worship of them with them to the New World. Employing Nativity parish and Bridgeport as microcosms of the immigrant, urban Roman Catholic world, in 1970 there were thirteen Roman Catholic

Parishes in the greater Bridgeport-South Loop are in 1970 and nine of them were dedicated to Mary and/or female saints.(www.uic.edu/ords/ the Ethnic History of Bridgeport)  (Because Bridgeport and the remainder of Chicago's southside were ethnically and religiously identical in the pre-world war II era, I assume that the naming patterns in Bridgeport were similar to other , earlier ,Church naming patterns; in other words, there was and is a rather wide-spread Marian worshipping habit in other southside Chicago neighborhoods.)

                    Within my Bridgeport, immigrant family, Mary adoration and the veneration of female Saints had a special place. Though we were Italian and naturally gravitated towards adoration of the famous male Italian saints like Francis of Assisi, my grandmother and parents had several Mary statues in the household, said the rosary, and had prayer cards and special novenas for S. Lucy, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Theresa of Avila. They regularly attended Church Marian services, such as the May crowning. Parishioneers of all genders and ethnic backrounds packed the church building for these services. In retrospect, I find it noteworthy that elementary school boys flocked to the Church for Marain ceremonies even during summer vacation. For example, the feast day of Our Lady of the Assumption fell on the 15^th of August.

                     The cult of female worship is a central feature of Catholic life among western Europeans.and their religious and cultural descendants in America. This pervasive ideology about the place of Mary and the women saints extends itself to male thinking about mothers, grandmothers, and nuns. For us students at Nativity, and for me in particular, the nun was an earthly Mary, infused with a particular saintly aura and authority, an aura cleverly used by the nuns to promote academic discipline.

That strict academic discipline, often ridiculed by former students, naturally increased educational performance and literacy. We learned because of the perception we had as to the near saintliness of our teachers.

                          It has often been remarked that boys may learn better from women than they do from men. Though little research has been done on the question, the writings of Freud and some of his followers provide a tentative answer. Freud hypothesized that boys become psychologically and emotionally connected to girls due to the psychosexual dynamics between boys and the dominant female figure in their early lives-their mothers. ( Freud  1962) Thus, boys may  very well develop a tendency to become attracted to comparable female authority figures, such as nuns, and therefore give them psuecoparental respect and obedience. If you  combine the religiously based character of nuns with the Freudian theoretical possibilities discussed in this paragragh, you have, for boys, a figure of immense holy and matriarchal power.

                     To me ,nuns were indeed all-powerful. Their authority issued from Heaven itself, and was reinforced at home by our mothers and fathers. To disobey a nun was tantamount to rejecting the Divine, and could under proper circumstances result in eternal damnation.

                    Inspite of the ridicule heaped upon thoughts such as these, many believe that nuns were dedicated to the education of their charges. A quote from an internet blog cite whose founders research nun-taught men and women, said this:

                                                     “I don’t want to sound like teachers today are not devoted….For

                                                             Nuns, our passage into heaven was their whole reason for being on

                                                                on earth…. Nuns were the spiritual and social glue that held everybody together"

                                                                          

                         Another internet poster to this blog said:

                                              “Sorry my post makes it sound like the sisters of my youth were abusive.

                                                 Not the case at all. The majority were fine teachers and down right saintly."

 

The “rules” of my religion and culture created female veneration and the importance of women. That in turn imbued our female-nun-teachers with an aura of authority, which translated into increased academic discipline for myself and therefore created and enhanced opportunity for educational, literate, and career success.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   In keeping with Gee’s and Street’s analytical theoroms, religion and gender are not the only facets to be explored in analyzing the development of literacy. Class-type patterns of conduct and beliefs also play a part. Though writers, media, and commentators have frequently characterized Bridgeport as working class, a characterization avidly promoted by the politicians who live there and cling to the notion that a working class persona public persona for the area and themselves is politically advantageous, lawyers, doctors, bankers, construction magnates, and governmental elite in significant numbers reside there.( www.uic. edu/orgs/ Ethnic History of Bridgeport.) The infusion and growth of this economic class created a very distinct upwardly mobile mentality for the large segments of the neighborhood and school population. Success once equaled jobs with the city’s Department of Sanitation, positions one could obtain with a mere high school education and patronage from the 11th Ward Democratic Organization. Now, in the 1960s forward, success for males   demanded careers in the law, business, and in government., and the only way to aceive that goal was through education; not just elemenary school educationbut advanced education in college, law school, and so on

                    Our neighborhood was therefore the epitome of the doctrines preached by  Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, and by Upton Sinclair in the Jungle, a novel set in the Bridgeport of 1906, with one caveat. Marx preached that the proletariat would seize control of the means of production - industry like coal mining or shipbuilding - and therefore  overthrow the ruling classes. In Bridgeport. the means of production was not industry in the Marxian sense; it was education instead. By sending their sons to Nativity, and then to the advanced high schools like St. Ignatius or DeLaSalle, and then to college and more, Bridgeport parents were seizing the means of production. Though, or perhaps on account of, my father’s status as a police officer, he and my mother believed that my brother and I needed to overcome our working class status by becoming businessmen, or lawyers. To attain that goal, one needed success in education and literacy. Thus, literacy became not just a consequence of nun-driven education; it also become a class conscious, class driven imperative.conscious,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

                    An unusual mosaic of gender, ethnicity, religion, class, and economics created a distinctive male literacy dominance in my grammar school ,and in this culturally based success enjoyed by myself and others like me in high school, college, graduate school, and in politics and government. Some thinkers, Gee among them, think that the “opportunity” for literacy is still another factor paramount for the development of reading and writing skills. Educators, in discussing the myriad explanations for subpar male educational performance, stress the breadth of distractions specifically and socially aimed at boys, such as sports, which occupy substantial blocks of their time and shove them away from reading, writing, homework, and other educational pursuits.(Powers 2008) Indeed, certain social contexts stress it is unmanly for boys to be literate, and instead influence boys into fighting, wrestling, and other avenues of aggression.(Newkirk 2002) This “distraction” argument would not have any bearing on Nativity parish, for we lacked schoolyards, public parks, gymnasiums, or any elementary school level athletics programs. Sports therefore did not become a distraction or obsession for me.1960s. My free time, invariably, became reserved for homework and literacy. The freedom from distractions, especially those diversions like sports, did not plague me.

                    I have attempted to prove , or at least discuss rationally,a number of different but intersecting points regarding literacy. First of all, I think my record and the acheivements of my fellow Nativity graduates, should give seirous pause to the ideas regarding the alleged superiority of girls over boys in reading and writing. Drawing upon the lessons of many writers, including Street and Gee, I applied a totality of the circumstances test to my own literacy background, and found that I and many of my male classmates and fellow alumnae created a literacy record which amply surpassed that of the girls. I do not say that our example is necessarily representative of all male learners. It should be investigated further, perhaps by myself in different academic contexts, but at the very least it creates some room for doubt as to the correctness of the studies showing female advantages.

                     This seminar paper, in its very essence, is really not about the male vs. female test score controversy. After all, as Professor Donald Graves said in Testing Is Not Teaching: What Should Count in Education,"testing..actually limits a students performance." It is, instead, a searching for the correct standards to be used in literacy analysis. The question as to how a particular person, or group of individuals, became literate, or are even literate at all, must be answered through a thorough analysis and evaluation of each and every factor in the subject's life. Only then, I believe, can a true picture of literacy exist; only then, can thoses schoolboys or schoolgirls who are on the brink of failure be coaxed back to successful academic life.

 

                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                            Works Cited

 

Delpit, Lisa, the Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse, from Other People's Children;New York, New Press 1995

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,trans. James Strachey, Basic Books, New York (1962)

Gee, James Paul, Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics: What is Literacy? appearing in Literacy; A Critical Sourcebook. Cushman, Ellen, etal, Eds.,   Bedford/St. Martin's     

                                

Graves, Donald, Testing Is Not Teaching,New Hampshire, Heineman Books, 2005

Knowles, Elizabeth, Martha Smith,Boys and Literacy: Practical Strategies for Teachers, Parents, and Librarians,Westport, Libraries Unlimited 2005

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Reading About the World. Paul, O'Brien  Ed.,Harcourt Brace, Washington,2005

Newkirk, Thomas, Misreading Masculinity:Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, Heineman Books, Philadelphia 2002

Powers, Peter,  Of Boys, Literacy, and Techno Toys in Teleread: in Bring the E-Books Home,http/www.teleread.org/blog/ 2008

Rausch, Thomas  P., S. J., The Roots of the Catholic Tradition, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2002

Sinclair, Upton,  The Jungle, Doubleday, Jabber and Company, Chicago, 1906

Street, Brian,  Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, Cambridge University Press, London, 1993

Schaff,Danielle, Michael Prendergast,  Don't Chew Jesus!:A Collection of Memorable Nun Stories, BenBella, New York 2006)

www. uic. edu/ org/  The Political History of Bridgeport ,2007

www,uic.edu/org/  The Ethnic History of Bridgeport  2007

www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion, Nuns Who Shaped Baby Boomers, The Chronicle-Herald , Murphy, Alex. ed., 2008

 

 

 

My Background and Experience in Literacy

 

 

 

 

 

                   My history in literacy is somewhat unique and therefore I recall it quite vividly. My mother and her mother, my grandmother, were avid, fanatical readers. Their reading tastes ran the gamut from history, especially British and Roman history, to mainstream, classical English and American literature, to the glossy, trashy magazines frequently found in supermarket check out lines.  If it had print on it, their motto was to read it. They read in large amounts. They averaged two to three novels a month, in addition to the numerous the newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, Biblical abstracts, and other documents they consumed like so many glasses of water and left  lying all over the table, couch and floor. When I was about four years old, I remember ambling out of my bedroom and observing them ensconced on the front room sofa, cigarette or drink (or both), in one hand, a novel, magazine, or some sort of book in the other. Often, I crawled up on their laps and watched with fascination as their eyes greedily scanned the pages. I knew that tales and stories existed in those little inky markings on the pages, and watching these maternal ancestors of mine constantly reading, I burned for the day I could read like them. I would skip their cigarettes and drinks, but other than that I wanted to be just like them.

 

 

 

                   My grandmother sensed this, and being the Italian grandmotherly type, she obtained a number of books she intended to read to me. They were adult classical books which had child adventure appeal to them, such as Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Secret Garden, among others. These she read to me in her theatrical way, right down to conjuring up British accents through her thick Italian dialectical way of speaking. Though these tales of faraway islands and fantastic people enraptured me, I was not satisfied. I wished to read, not to be read to.

 

 

 

                   At one point in this time period, my grandmother bought me a set of children’s encyclopedias. The particular set she got, whose name now escapes me, had a sort of geographical bent to them. The book contained maps of all of the world’s countries with little explanatory paragraphs. One day, many months before that, she had shown me a map of Italy, and proudly pointed out with her bony finger the place she was born, Pompeii, the home of the most extensive ancient ruins in the Roman world. In poring over the encyclopedia one day, I spotted a map of Italy, which I recognized from its singular peninsular shape, and the adjacent photos of famous art, Roman ruins, and churches. In bold black letters the word

 

“ITALY” was printed across the map. I quickly put two and two together and intuited what that word meant. I could read!

 

 

 

                    This was a momentous discovery. I had found a key which unlocked  a special door. From figuring out what “ITALY” meant, I was able, occasionally with my grandmother’s help, to piece together the names of all of the continents, countries, oceans, and whatnot in the encyclopedia. Soon, I was able to read unaided the little stories that accompanied the maps and pictures. Pretty soon, I was taking my turn on the living room sofa reading with  my mother and grandmother. I had become one of them.

 

 

 

                   My literacy, coming at a relatively young age as it did, had multiple hues of familial, cultural, social, and educational meaning. For one, I became rather advanced in school rather early, so much so that the nuns, my teachers, made me take third grade  courses when I was in second grade. This physically removed me from students my own age and put me in class with older kids. Naturally,  I began to adopt the habits of the older students, which I necessarily was not prepared for. One such social change wrought by this premature literacy was relations with the opposite sex. I wanted to have dates with girls just like the older kids, but of course I was turned down. When in these upper grades, I was in a socially precarious situation; I blame that all on my ability to read early.

 

 

 

                   Another strand of literacy which I experienced as a youngster was my exposure to the Italian language. The elders in my family had been born in Italy and naturally spoke the language fluently. I was able to pick up a great deal of the language, though by no means did I become fluent or even close to fluent. However, knowing large chunks of the language did have the effect of opening up my horizons and my mind. I was able to pick up a sizeable portion of the Spanish language, it and Italian being fellow Romance tongues, and it opened up my mind to different cultures and people. I believe this brush with foreign language literacy made me a fundamentally fair person.

 

 

 

                   Lastly, my literacy was increased and altered, in a good or bad way I don’t know, by my law school education. Law school gives students a real sense of social and political power. One of the methods that the law employs to give lawyers this heightened sense of power is the new language law students are taught, a language which becomes their exclusive domain. These words, having a mainly Latin origin, are a mystery to the general public and in part are responsible for the public relying on lawyers exclusively to solve their legal dispute. Res ipsa loquiter, eminent domainus, actus reus, mens rea, are just a very small sample of the legal language juggernaut which every lawyer has at his command. This literacy changes those who practice the law fundamentally. It increases their legal power, their finances, their social standing, and their education. They become self-possessed and self-anointed guardians of the social order, a position they would not be able to attain without the use of this specialized language.