Literacy Narrative Free Essays

Literacy Narrative The anticipation of knowing whether we were going to be champions or not was very high as we played our hearts out on the court. Everything we’d practiced for was being put to the test in this one moment. It all came down to this last lay-up. We will write a custom essay sample on Literacy Narrative or any similar topic only for you Order Now Did we get the point? When I was eleven years old I played recreational basketball with a nearby playground called Susan Park. Me and my little brother both were involved in almost every sport they offered. My favorites were volleyball and basketball. Going to practice was the highlight of my day. I really put my heart into these sports. Our basketball team this particular year was undefeated. As a post player and shooting guard there was a lot of pressure on me to get the ball to the goal at any cost and that’s ultimately what I did in every game. It was our championship game and the heat was on like never before. Recruiters from the All-Stars team were there to watch us and pick their favorites so the pressure was definitely on for the players who were looking to take it to the next level. The game starts and we’re all basically in the warm-up stage of the game we’d score, they’d score, nothing too intense. All of a sudden we start getting into the climax of the game, only about five minutes left. We were only two points away from beating them and it was up to one person on our team to step up and go for the game winning lay-up, that person was me. There were a few seconds left of the game and we still had to get up the court and to the goal. As the referee blew the whistle my heart sank but I knew what I had to do. The ball was passed to me and with no hesitation I ran down the court as if I was the only person out there and went up for the lay-up like a pro and I made it! This was definitely the best day of my life. The crowd rushed towards me and picked me up just like in the movies, I felt like a star! After the crowd and everything calmed down and came to an end a recruiter from the all-star team came up to me and extended invitation for me to tryout and hopefully being a member of the team. I was ecstatic about the opportunity and I did make it and went on to play for the Kenner All-Stars. This was definitely a memorable moment in my life and taught me to always go for even the things in life that you may doubt or be nervous about. Not all things are impossible. How to cite Literacy Narrative, Essays Literacy Narrative Free Essays Kyle Crifasi Richard English IV, 1B 31 August 2011 Literacy Narrative Typically, people think of reading when they see a novel or a short story, but I think of reading when I’m out on the baseball field. When I hear the word â€Å"reading†, unlike most people, I think of a green grassy baseball diamond at night, with the lights lighting it up, filled with fans in the stands. Believe it or not, I read all the time on the field. We will write a custom essay sample on Literacy Narrative or any similar topic only for you Order Now I read the ball coming off the bat when I’m playing in the field. When I hear the â€Å"ding† of the metal bat and hard, rubber ball colliding, I know that there is a chance I could make a great play. I can see the ball getting bigger and bigger as in approaches me. I read the ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand, picking up the spin as soon as I can so I can know when and where to swing to make solid contact with the ball. I even read people’s body language when I’m pitching. I can tell a lot about the batter by how he’s standing and the facial expression on his face. Learning how to read all of these things took lots of practice and discipline. Throughout the years, all of my coaches have stressed how important it is to react to what I see through my â€Å"readings†. I learned to read these things when I was just a little four foot tall, 60-pound kid. A bit after I started to learn how to read words on paper, I was learning to read on the field, too. I find the reading that I do on the field much more fun than reading a book or story. I believe that my love for baseball grew because I felt a connection with the type of reading it involved rather than the kind of reading done with books. These readings are important to me so I can do my job and be the best player I can be on the field. When I’m at bat, I have to read the spin on the ball as it comes out of the pitcher’s hand as fast as I can so I can react with the perfect swing at the best time in the right location. If I don’t read it correctly or if a pitch fools me, I swing and miss. I’ll have to deal with striking out for the rest of the game until I get my next chance to show what I can do. When I’m in the outfield, my job is to catch anything that’s hit into my area. I have to be able to read the ball right when it makes a connection with the opposing batter’s bat. I have to know how high its going, how hard its hit, which way it’s spinning, and which way the wind will blow it. If I read one of these things wrong, it could turn out to be bad for the team and embarrassing for me if I miss it. Coach Broussard would always tell me to look into the opposing batter’s eyes when I pitch. That intimidating look that a pitcher can give will really get in the batter’s head. He will be wondering hundreds of different thoughts before I throw the ball exactly where I want it. I’m the one in control and he is just going through his mind trying to figure out, or guess, which pitch I’m about to throw him. After a couple pitches, when I have him right where I want him, I can play around with his mind even more. I can throw anything I want and I can even waste a couple bad pitches hoping he’ll swing and miss, just to make him look stupid. When I can read all of these things correctly, that’s when I can play the best and it’s because of my coaches and what they have taught me that have made me so great at â€Å"reading†. Reading is important in my life not only on the field but in the classroom as well. Without learning how to truly read and write, I would not be able to accomplish anything in life. I remember when I first learned to read. I was about three years old and my mom would read books to me and I would follow along with her. She would read the books with the gold spines and they were always books that made me happy and I was always happy to read them. I always enjoyed reading back then more than I do now. The books that I read now, I’m usually forced to read and they usually aren’t interesting to me. To me, reading means many things, not only the reading of text on a page but actions of others and myself as well. Most other people may not say that they will think of baseball games when thinking of how they read in real life, but I view the game of baseball that way and I like to share about how I can read in many different ways in life. Reading books is definitely not one of my favorite hobbies to do, but every once in a while I will find a good book that will catch my interest for the next couple of months. My learning experience from reading on the field has taught me another meaning of literacy that I would not have realized if I had not thought about what reading really meant to me. I can now understand how I use reading in all different aspects of my life better, and not just in the classroom but throughout my everyday activities, like baseball. Words: 1000 How to cite Literacy Narrative, Essays Literacy Narrative Free Essays It all started in middle school. I had my first â€Å"real† English class where we had to actually read, write, and do work ourselves. It was a rude awakening because I was never a fan of writing, especially on my own. We will write a custom essay sample on Literacy Narrative or any similar topic only for you Order Now I remember the countless nights of struggling to write even a single paragraph. I would sit at my desk staring at the computer screen, hoping sentences would somehow magically appear. I would always wonder why I had to write this because I thought it would not be relevant to any career I would have in the future. Ever since I was a kid I have always liked math and science more than English. They seemed to come naturally to me, and I did much better in those types of classes. However, as time went by, my English and writing skills began to somewhat improve. In high school, my freshman and sophomore year English classes were not too bad. There was the occasional essay where we had to write maybe two pages. Because of this though, I became a better writer and thinker. I was never too worried when we would get assigned an essay because I could usually knock it out in a few hours the night before it was due, and still get a pretty good grade on it. However, this all changed my junior year. When I discovered that my English teacher in my junior year was Mr. Kuhn, I began to get very worried. All I heard from his past students was that he was a very strict grader who only liked a certain style of writing; and if you did not write his way you suffered the consequences. Unfortunately, when I was assigned the first essay I did not take it as seriously as I should have. I procrastinated once again and wrote this haphazard essay in a mere hour and a half. When Mr. Kuhn returned our graded essays to us, I was all but surprised to see that I got a C-, which was the lowest essay grade I had gotten. Out of disappointment in myself, I promised that I would do my best to not procrastinate and dedicate more time to this class. As my junior year went by, I felt as if I were going back to middle school. I would spend hours looking at a blank computer screen, trying to think of the perfect thing to write so I could get a good grade, even though that was unlikely. Based on how the year was going, one could only imagine how  distraught I was when my teacher assigned us an eight-page research paper. I kept thinking, â€Å"If I am having so much trouble writing three to four page essays, how could I possibly write an eight-page essay? † On the bright side, however, the topic of this paper was to pick a side of a controversial or opinionated issue, and use sources to help explain why you think it is right. After several days of failed topics, as well as stress build-up, a light bulb finally lit up over my head. Ever since I was younger, I have always taken an interest to past wars and the leaders who fought in them. I guess it was because several of my family members fought in wars. Nevertheless, I came up with the issue of how Robert E. Lee, general of the Confederate Army in the Civil War, should be considered an American hero. I felt that most people regarded him as a traitor who should be condemned, while I believed that he was a respected man who did not fight for slavery, but for honor and family. I finally found something I could write that I considered fascinating, and I was extremely excited about it. After a few weeks of writing and revising, I eventually finished the essay, making it exactly the way I wanted it. This was one of the very few papers that I actually felt confident about as I handed it in to my teacher. When Mr. Kuhn returned the essays, I was astounded to see that I got a 97. It was the highest essay grade that I got in his class, and I could tell that he was fairly impressed. To this day, that research paper is my finest piece of work, but I am still eager to put my English skills to the test and become a better writer. How to cite Literacy Narrative, Essays Literacy Narrative Free Essays Literacy Narrative Learning to read, write, and compose is a major part of every human beings life and if your guided and/or helped to becoming a good reader, writer, or composer that is double the excellence. Learning to read, write, and compose is a privilege. Not all humans get this privilege of learning these special qualities. We will write a custom essay sample on Literacy Narrative or any similar topic only for you Order Now These qualities not only help you with other humans but with yourself in the rest of your life. These qualities or traits you obtain help you in everyday life to help you live a life at ease without the struggle of not being able to read, write, compose, and such. When I was very young, my parents would read to me every night I went to sleep. They would tell me â€Å"Austin, it’s time for bed,† and I would run to my room to my blue bookshelf that I had in the corner of my room. Now, they would be following close behind me and re-emphasize that I could only choose two books, but usually I convinced them to let me pick out three books instead. I loved having a ton of books when I was young and all of them made it to my bookshelf. My favorite books were â€Å"The Little Engine That Could† and another book that was about a bear that went outside to play and got ants in his pants. This book usually got a little giggle out of me as a child and oh how I loved my parents reading it and all the other books to me. This explains my sprint to my room every night as a youngster. Having my parents read to me at a very young age somewhat jumpstarted my brain and led me to learn lots of words and phrases as a kid. Being that they read to me every night, I always was listening and hearing words and even sometimes having an image to relate words to. I believe that the reading that was done for me every night before I went to bed was a large part of my learning to read. At this age, it was almost as if I’d rather not see the words, but just listen to them and look at all the pictures. As I grew up I started to really enjoy reading. I think that all the reading my parents did for me, encouraged me to become an avid reader then. At this age, I became the biggest fan of â€Å"The Magic Tree House† series by Mary Pope Osborne. I read these books from cover to cover and enjoyed every one of them. After finishing one of the books, I would love going and telling my parents all about the story line and what happened in it. When I would finish the last book that was published, I would pre-order the next book that was coming out and start reading it the day I got it. These books always drew my attention and most definitely sparked my likings for reading in elementary and middle school. In elementary and middle school my mom would always pick me and my little brother up. One thing I would always seem to notice is that my mom was usually on the phone so I couldn’t tell her about my day the second I got in the car, but when she eventually got off; my brother and I were full of words. We both loved talking and telling stories about our days. Whenever my dad would arrive home after work around 6 pm every night, I would notice he always got in and hit his desk with piles of papers and work to do that night. He would have some leisure time to read the paper and eat dinner but then he was paying bills and getting his deadlines met for work. My mom and dad always had these big complicated conversations in the kitchen too when I was around, usually about my dad’s work drama, with these words that I had no idea existed. As I grew up, my interest for books started to somewhat slip off the map. I didn’t always have a book that I was working on and I wasn’t ever really as excited to read like I was when I was much younger. The projects and homework started to pile up a lot more once school progressed from elementary school to middle school to high school and I feel that it almost eats away at my free time to do any casual reading anymore. When I did have a project or an interesting reading for homework though, I would enjoy doing the research and learning new things about the certain topics. When my love for books continued to fade away, I picked up a new hobby of reading magazines and the newspaper. I love reading things in the paper that I know have to do with my city and me and love reading an interesting magazine whether it’s the new edition of Sports Illustrated or the Hunting Gear Magazine full of cool articles about new weapons across the globe. I started reading the paper every morning and subscribing to interesting magazines on the internet that I just couldn’t get enough of. I believe that all my life experiences and my classes as a young child led me to being a very successful reader and writer. I feel that the reading and writing I learned and accomplished really helped me to be able to write more civilized and professional and allowed me to hold more professional conversations with my parents, friends, other adults, and so on. My early experiences with reading really led me to a more successful life in reading thanks to all the reading my parents contributed to me when I was younger. Like I said, I believe that the reading they did was the biggest help to my learning in reading and will lead me to having successful college years and having a successful career later in life. How to cite Literacy Narrative, Essays