Blog #1 Autobigoraphy

    

Picture of ME

    My name is Christopher Torres. It is currently my Junior year at NJCU, and I'm majoring in Computer Science. My hobbies are playing video games and learning about history. As a kid, I played soccer, and in high school, I was on the fencing team. I completed all of the general education requirements besides my capstone course. I decided to choose this class in particular because this one interested me the most out of all the available courses. I know very little of the history of the public education system, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn something new.

    My memory of the beginning of my literacy is generally fuzzy. The earliest memory I have was with my parents as a small kid. Every night, we would read children's stories and take turns reading lines in the book. I remember practicing writing letters with tracing sheets. My parents promoted my literacy learning very heavily in my early childhood, but they would eventually stop. The most significant moment for my literacy learning was the development of a speech impediment. I had a lot of difficulties pronouncing certain letters. This forced me to have speech lessons every week in school. I vividly remember crying because I couldn't correctly say "yellow" during one of the speech sessions. Luckily I wasn't in this speech class for long, and in a few years, I completed the class. I still had some speech issues for a while, but I ironed all my problems out by the time I was in high school.

    Besides my speech issues, I considered my literacy skills average when I was growing up, but I still had problems. A particular challenge with my literacy learning was learning to write. My penmanship and writing skills were awful. I dreaded every single time I had to write any sort of essay. I think I was fully literate by the time I was a junior in high school because that was the time I became comfortable with writing and had decent speech skills.

    When I was growing up, I actually hated the formal idea of reading fictional stories. This almost hampered me from doing any sort of reading. Luckily I grew a deep interest in history, which I think I got from my gaming hobby. Seeing such exciting stories inspired by actual events made me really inspired to read about them. This eventually blossomed into my pursuit of learning history. My literacy development heavily contrasts with my sisters. Both of my sisters enjoyed reading long, complex fictional books at an early age. I looked up to their skills when I was growing up.

    Literacy is very important for communicating with others efficiently. I'd argue that literacy is more important than ever with the proliferation of the internet. As our lives get more digital, we need to read and write efficiently to take advantage of technology. Even though I'm a stem major, literacy still has a big part in my career path. There's a reason why programming languages are called languages, even though it's a bit different from learning a spoken language. Nowadays, programming and history reading tends to be my primary way of gaining literacy.