Lauren's Literacy Narrative

     Dad is and always has been the polar opposite of my mom . You'll notice in the linked post that I've included a photo of her and I together. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what does it mean that I don't have a single picture with my dad on my phone? For the sake of maintaining uniformity between posts, here's a photo of the type of father I wish I'd had growing up:     This is Bandit, the dad from popular Australian cartoon Bluey. He's a great father who loves his daughters; he encourages their imaginations by playing games with them and always shows them he loves them.     Unlike the little girls in the cartoon, I've never been close to my dad. Like Bandit, he fostered my  imagination when I was little, but not for the better. I hated going to his house for court-mandated visitations every other weekend, so I would mope the whole time. The only thing he could do to stop me from crying (or getting angry) was to placate me wi...

      Besides a few select geniuses, most people had to be taught how to read. Although I was arrogant enough to call myself a genius when I was a child, I too needed to be taught. It became clear early on that my reading comprehension was at a higher level than my peers. By first grade I could read books meant for middle schoolers. My parents nourished my love of reading, but in two drastically different ways. Because they encouraged me to develop my literacy skills, Deborah Brandt would call them my literacy sponsors. Brandt defines a literacy sponsor as “a delivery system for the economies of literacy, the means by which these forces present themselves to – and through – individual learners” ("Sponsors of Literacy", p. 167). She refers to a metaphorical delivery system, but my parents were literally delivering the materials necessary to sponsor my literacy since I was a kid with no money to buy books.     Each parent will get an individual post, but the gist ...