"Learning as an Adult"

One of the reasons I chose to read this essay was one of a personal interest. Being an adult learner myself, I was intrigued by Susan L. Lytle title of her writing, “Living Literacy: Rethinking Development in Adulthood”. Lytle starts out her essay with some alarming facts about various degrees of illiteracy in adulthood, with many causes contributing to these factors. Many individuals refer to these adults as "incomplete adults" that are "incompetent" and lacking the needed skills to perform higher level thinking (Lytle 376-378). I feel this goes beyond the truth and is not the case for all adult learners. I like how she goes in depth later on in her paper in the section, Issues and Assumptions in Rethinking Development: Portraying Adults. She looks beyond just illiterate adults and looks at understanding literacy development in adulthood even with literate adults. Breaking down literacy into four dimensions, beliefs, practices, processes, and plan gave insight to and reality to what goes on in the mind of an adult learner. A lot of her findings hit home with me. It is not as simple as people think it is for adult learners, even for ones that are literate. As this article states, there are many factors that contribute to the continuing education of adults. Let’s not all assume because we are adults we know everything. We want to learn, at least most of us do. Understanding the complexity that Lyle inquires throughout her article, we as adults can open our minds, enjoying the literacy we all strive for.

"Restructuring My Thoughts"

Given the preconceived notion that the text in the essay written by Walter J. Ong, titled” Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” was going to restructure my reading, because of its difficulty, I decided to read the essay at least three times in order to understand its meaning. Ong obviously takes writing as a new technology to great heights. His use of complex words definitely takes away the emotion in writing that he strongly proclaims. I felt the composition disengage me as a reader, mainly because I spent more time looking up words I didn’t know rather than understanding the meaning of the text. I did painstakingly get through three readings of this composition and did come away with some meaning from the text. Ironically, Ong simplistic title for this essay explains exactly what this complex composition was try to say. Maybe that was his motivation behind this writing. It definitely restructured my thoughts in the way writing he states is portrayed as a non emotional way to communicate, or did it. It definitely got my thoughts and emotion going . Ong proclaims,"Writing is a consciousness-raising and humanizing technology". (31)

"Sponsors of Literacy," by Deborah Brandt

After seeing the title of this essay and ready “Sponsors of Literacy” by Deborah Brandt, I never really thought of the connection between these two ideas and how one seems to motivate the other, motivation being the main factor in many aspects of literacy or life for that matter. Motivation comes in many different forms as Brandt points out in her essay. Sponsors usually “sponsor” because of some sort of underlying investment that they have put into something that they are passionate about our have interest in. In this case, in this essay, it was literacy. She touches on the positive and negative aspects of sponsorships in literacy. I felt her purpose in this essay was to give us a look at the positive side sponsorship in literacy gives us. Sponsorship is the motivational factor that pushes literacy on and on and keeps learning and teaching literacy, past and present towards a positive and enlightened outcome.