Final Reflection

1/2 cup of confusion

1 tpsn. of frustration

1 cup of indifference

2 cups of optimism

1 cup of creative juices

First, you add that confusion, frustration, and indifference.  It will have a sticky and gooey consistency that is hard to work with. You will have to kneed through the toughness the best that you can.  Then you first mix in the 2 cups of optimism and it will be much easier to mix.  Lastly, you put in the 1 cup of creative juices.  Then you will have a creamy and fluffy mixture.  Your final product will be great and ready to serve.  

"Wobble" is kind of an unusual word that I don't typically use.  In class, Lacy asked us about our moments of wobble, productive discomfort, at a time in this class.  I wasn't sure about this word wobble  quite yet, but I knew about a time when I had productive discomfort in my writing.  I immediately thought about the writing process of my literacy narrative.  I was really confused about what to write about and I didn't really know what I could talk about because I didn't feel as though my literacy history was all that interesting.  I wrote about my experiences with literacy but I felt like it was way too bland and Lacy told me that I should expand on my ideas and play around with some different approaches.  I tried my best to take her advice with playing around with the different approaches that I learned and read about in class.  After doing so, I still didn't have a strong sense of confidence in my writing and I didn't think that it lived up to its expectations.  I tried my best to play around and mess with different ideas and I made my literacy narrative the best that I could have.  I would work a little bit here and there but I would get so frustrated that I had to stop and work on it a different day.  I really liked that we had the choice of having a rolling due date because it allowed me to work on it when I was in the writing mood and not when I was so stressed out with my other school work.  In the end, I feel like I grew as a writer during this process because I went through a bunch of ups and downs and learned a lot.

Literacy Narrative Process

“Hhhmmm, which book should I pick out for mamma to read to me tonight?” I thought to myself and I shuffled books around on my bookshelf.  Wearing my oversized t-shirt, I had to be able to play with my belly-button, and a full belly from dinner I picked out my favorite book Love You Forever and I curled up in bed next to my mom.  She read each page with so much emotion and love and I could definitely feel that through her reading.  “I wonder what it’s going to be like when I am going to be the one reading books,” I pondered to myself as I listened to my mom read those meaningful words.  I wanted to pick out more and more books and just have her read to me all night.  I loved the different messages that all of the books had.  “It’s going to be absolutely amazing being a big girl and reading all of the books that there are out in the world.”  I thought.  I had a big love for reading, and it’s a shame that it would come to an end as I got older. 

This was the excerpt that I picked out to share with the class.  I thought that this was an interesting part of my paper because it tells a story about how my literacy history began.  To me, this writing process was extremely stressful!  When we were doing the notecard assignment in class I was honestly struggling to think of things to write down and I actually randomly wrote things down because I didn't feel as though I had anything else to write.  With my first draft I kind of collected some thoughts together and typed them up as best that I could.  It was in a completely unorganized fashion and I don't think that it made too much sense.  My next draft was a little bit better.  I made some minor changes and got more ideas written down.  I got a little side tracked with the ethnography project and forgot about my literacy narrative and I didn't work on it for a few weeks.  Once the ethnography was done I sat down to work on my narrative and I actually had a completely different mind set about the paper.  I was thinking in ways that I had never thought before and my creative juices were flowing out onto my paper.  I think that the analytical thinking that I had to do in the ethnography actually made my writing process a lot easier for my literacy narrative.  When I was writing my final draft I changed my paper a lot!  I added in some excerpts which Lacy advised me to do.  I made my thoughts more complete and completed my paper as a whole.  In the end, I'm glad that we did this paper because it made me think in different ways and come up with a topic that was all mine and allowed me to go in any direction with it.  I liked being about to revise my work as much as I wanted to and being about to play around with different ideas.

Ethnography

Quotes and Messages

For the ethnography project, my group chose to do quotes and messages.  To me, quotes are important words to live by.  The picture above is my favorite quote.  It reminds me everyday that I can do anything  possible as long as I have a good mind set.  As we worked on our project we found that we don't all have to same meanings for the same quote.  

When we were first assigned this project my group was actually really confused about what to write about.  We didn't understand what we were being asked to do.  We played around with a bunch of different ideas but we couldn't quite put our finger on what we wanted to do.  We brainstormed a bunch of different ideas and we first thought about doing a prezi, then a slide show, and then we finally decided that a powerpoint would be our best option.  Once we had the idea of going around taking pictures of quotes and messages we took off running.  Each one of us took pictures and wrote down what it meant to us.  In the end, we put all of the pictures and meaning together in a powerpoint and presented the final product to the class.  

Since we didn't really know what we were supposed to be doing in the beginning of this project we had to come up with a bunch of different ideas and change them around as we needed.  It was really nice that Lacy would come up to each group and talk about what we had and what we needed to add or change. Once we got the analysis part of the project done, we didn't have much more revising that we needed to do.   

I was in a group with Olivia Armstrong, Nikki Pacitti, and Nolan Ollis and we worked really well together.  We all pulled our own weight and we all did what we were supposed to do.  Each one of us collected pictures and shared them as a group through email.  We met at the library to discuss the meanings of the quotes and messages and we also put the powerpoint together. I liked doing this project in a group because it allowed us to put all of our ideas together and it was cool to see how we each thought of different meanings for the quotes.

I thought that doing this ethnography project in an "untraditional" was was really cool!  I had a friend that had to do this project but she had to write it in an essay format and she was not excited or interested in the project at all.  For me, I'm not big into writing papers so I was excited to be able to work with a group and use technology.  Doing it this way made it much more enjoyable and I was really excited about working in a group setting.  When we presented the projects in class it was cool to see how each group did something different.  Not one group had the same presentation.  If we did it in essay form then all of the projects would have been very similar.

Overall, I thought that this project was very interesting because each group had a very unique topic and each group put forth a lot of effort to make their project the best possible.  I also thought that it was really cool that the group topics were kind of different and nonconventional.  I would never have thought that food or clothes had an underlife, but the way the groups thought things out gave me a complete different understanding.  This project definitely made me think outside the box and think in untraditional ways.  I truly enjoyed working on this ethnography.

Soccer Ball

Sitting there in the grass, round and firm.  Rolling fast, rolling slow, not knowing where it's gonna go.  Getting kicked around in the air or on the ground.  Flying in the back of the net, winning games, making dreams come true.  

Something that made me laugh

When Lacy asked us to think about a memory that made us laugh I immediately had a vivid memory from when I was younger.  I am the youngest of three girls and when I was younger  I wanted to do everything that my two older sisters were doing.  We grew up on a street with a bunch of kids our ages.  Everyday after school and on the weekends all of the kids on the street would play outside and ride bikes or roller blade.  I begged and begged my parents to let me take my training wheels off but they kept telling me that I was too little to ride a bike without training wheels.  Finally, after months of begging they finally let me do it.  I remember being in the street and my mom was holding that back of my bike so that I could balance.  I was a feisty four year old and I wanted to do it all by myself.  I pushed my mom away and took off down the street on a two wheeler with out and struggle at all.  My parents and myself were in udder amazement.

As I was thinking and writing about this day in my day book I couldn't help but laugh.  What four year old gets on a bike and rides it with out any practice? At the time, if I was my mom, I think I would have had a heart attack.  When we get to write about fun memories it always puts me in the best moods because I get to think about all of the fun I had growing up.  I love reminiscing on the past!!

Annotated Bibliography

When I read the description of this assignment I was actually excited.  I was mainly excited about this assignment because it gave me the opportunity to think deeper about my project and grasp a better meaning of it.  The three primary sources that I used were and interview with my roommate Robbie, a picture that I saw on Pinterest, and a trunk that is in our room.  

When I sat down with Robbie to interview her for this assignment she was kind of skeptical and didn't really know what to say.  When I was explaining to her about our ethnography and how my group is looking at messages and quotes she started to think more about it and her thoughts began to flow easily.   She told me that when she reads quotes, no matter where they are, she tries to look deeper into the meaning of the words.  She said that she never thought about how quotes and messages could be a form of literacy until now.  She thought that it was really cool that there is a connection.  

Corrigan, Robbie. Personal Interview. 1 2012.

I was looking through my Pinterest earlier today and I came across this quote.  It is very simple, but I think that it could stand for so much.  In life, one has to step out of their comfort zone and go out onto this so called limb so that they can experience all that is out there for them.  Once somebody has gone out of that limb, they can experience so much more than they would have if they stayed in their little bubble.  I believe that this quote completely pertains to literacy because if one goes out of a limb they can experience so much with their writing.  When Lacy responded to my literacy narrative she told me that it would be good/ interesting if I took some different approaches in my writing.  I think that that is probably the best advice I have gotten.  I was really kind of down about my writing because I didn't think that it was good and I didn't really know what to do for it.  After Lacy gave me some ideas for my literacy narrative I definitely wanted to go out on that limb and take those chances.  There is most definitely "fruit" out on those limbs that make taking risks worth while.

"Quotes." Pinterest. 4 2012: n. page. Print. <http://pinterest.com/all/?category=quotes>.

"When you look at a field of dandelions, you can either see a hundred weeds of a hundred wishes."  In our dorm, we have a trunk that has this quote painted on it.  I think that this is one hundred percent right.  You have to have a positive outlook on life in every situation to see the beauty in everything.  I think that this pertains to literacy because you have to have a positive outlook on your writing or it won't have as great of a potential.  If you have that positive attitude than you can accomplish so much more with your writing.  

Artifact. Trunk in my dorm. Quote painted on it.

Re-Mapping Literacy Events

The first time that I did this mapping assignment I found a quote that was hanging on the wall in the common room of my dorm room.  When we got in groups in class we all decided that we would do messages and quotes as the concentration for our project.  I was actually rather excited for this topic because I am fascinated by all sorts of quotes.  Our group decided to look through the library to find quotes and messages.  I posted pictures above of some of the different messages that I found.  One place that I found to be particularly helpful was the round computer tables.  There were these tri-folds that had different pictures with a message on them.  I thought that the most interesting part about these messages was that they didn't really go with the picture in a sense.  Well that was appropriate for the library, I thought.  They definitely got the point across though.  It made me start thinking about how people can interpret these messages in so many different ways and how that is actually perfectly fine!  I sometimes wonder how people can interpret things differently, even when it's in the simplest terms.  This assignment has made me look at things differently now, and by that I mean looking deeper into its meaning.  Before this class I only thought about stuff on the surface and never got into deeper detail.  I think that it's really cool that I was given this opportunity to look at quotes and messages around the library here at UNC Charlotte.

Hidden Literacies

As I was looking around campus for hidden literacies I came across this canvas on the wall in my room.  I thought that this quote was completely appropriate.  I first read it as though you aren't willing to look stupid in public.  The more and more I thought about it, I thought that you could use this quote for writing.  You need to be willing to silly/risky when you are writing.  Earlier today Lacy told me that I needed to take more risks in my literacy narrative and then I stumbled upon this quote shortly after.  I thought that it was fate in a way that I saw this and actually understood what it was saying today.  I wonder what literacy would be like if the authors weren't willing to take the risks that they did.  Would people enjoy reading or writing as much?  Literacy would be very bland and not interesting.  I think that one of the most important things in life is to take risks and to not be afraid of what other people think.  

Literacy Narrative Organization

In class we were working on are literacy narratives and Lacy asked us to make an organizational chart to help us write.  I thought I would make a chart that showed my literacy history in chronological order.  I thought this would be easiest because it put all of my information in an organized manner.  When I was making this chart, my thoughts flowed easier thinking about my literacy history because it made me think about all of the different events.  I was actually able to think of a lot more events that happened when I was doing this assignment.

Midterm

For our midterm assignment in English 1101 we were assigned to go to Atkins Library and find a mentor text that would assist in writing our literacy narrative.  Once we found the mentor text of our choice we were asked to do a "write beside the text" in our day books.

My group went to the library on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m..  It was an extremely muggy and yucky Tuesday morning.  This weather made me want to crawl right back in my bed but I knew I couldn't do so.  My group was supposed to meet at the front entrance of Atkins Library.  When all of my group members were there, we headed into the large and extremely overwhelming library.  We stood at the front desk at the computer but didn't exactly know what to look for.  We were searching and searching but didn't know where we wanted to go with this project.  Chris then thought of the idea of using The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.  I wrote down the call number and we were on our way.

We got to the 2nd floor and found to CIMC section and began looking.  We were totally confused to why we were looking through text books and other kinds of teaching aids.  We couldn't even find the text book that we were looking for.  The group came to a unanimous decision and decided to go back down the to front desk and find another Tom Sawyer location.  In doing so, we found the real Tom Sawyer book in the juvenile section on the 5th floor and we headed up there.

The 5th floor is much, much smaller than the 2nd floor so it took us no time to fine the isle that our book was on.  I started down the isle and was looking for the appropriate call numbers.  My group members were following behind me to make sure I didn't miss anything.  On the right side, on the middleish shelf, I found the mentor text we were on the mission to find, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  I pulled the book off of the shelf and we flipped through the pages and began our five minute "write beside the text."

As I was writing in my daybook I realized that this is probably the best book that we could have chosen to aid me in writing my literacy narrative.  My group was really happy that we decided on this book because there were so many different elements that we could all use.  I actually really enjoyed this assignment because it gave me the opportunity to really think about my literacy narrative and how I could incorporate many different elements.  My group worked really well together in this process.  We knew what book we wanted and we were on the mission to find it, and we did so.

Bary

“Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up” – Pablo Picasso

I thought that this cartoon was very enjoyable and extremely relatable.  It focused on how when we were younger we had the freedom to write and draw, but as we get older we no longer have that freedom.  I think that this is so incredibly true.  When I was in elementary school I could draw just about whatever my little, naive mind wanted to draw.  If I were to draw or write something obscene now I would either get in trouble or be wrongly judged.  I think it is unfair and even wrong that we have these not only restrictions but judgements when we write something that is "obscene" to some people.  Like this quote says, many people lose their creativity when they get older because they have so many restrictions on what they can and can't write.  I know for me, these restrictions/judgements make me not so excited and interested in writing.  When you have a set topic you have to write about and so many rules when you're writing it seems to take the fun out of writing. 

Where I'm From

I am from parents
two loving, supportive parents
two fun-loving older sisters
one playful, large golden retriever

I am from a cozy home
from the large oak tree in the yard
I am from the clean,
laundry smelling home

I am from the chaos
from the bonding moments
I am from movie nights
from Sunday family dinners

I am from parents
two caring, compassionate parents
two amazing older sisters
one joyful, loving golden retriever

From Ralph Fletcher, Breathing In Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer's Notebook


"Not many of us are brave or brazen enough to go public and let the world judge our early failed writings.  That's where the notebooks come in.  It gives us a private place to write badly."

My daybook is my safe place to write down my thoughts and I will not be judged.  Like writing, many people are afraid to go out in the world and show their true personality.  I feel safe around my closets friends and family and in my home.  My daybook is my safe place to write.  Nobody will judge me for what I write or how bad my grammar is.  Writing in my daybook is one of my favorite things to do.  I can let all of my thoughts out and they flow so easily.  Writing in my book is very liberating.

Letter to writing group

On one of the first day of classes we had to write a letter to our writing groups that pretty much let them know more about us.  I didn't really know what I should write because my life isn't that interesting. All   I could talk about was what I did in high school and what my hobbies are, boring I know.

We had to write this as a homework assignment and I was excited to reflect on my life before coming to UNC Charlotte.   I had been struggling with the transition into college because it was a huge change in my life and I wasn't used to being this different person per say.  As I was writing I realized that I am who I am and I will never change, no matter the circumstances.  I will always enjoy the same things as I always have and no matter where I am.

In class the next day we got in our writing groups and passed our letter around to each person.  When each person finished reading my letter the left a comment on it.  It was really cool and interesting to go back and read these comments because each person said something different.  It was cool to see how I had so much in common with these people even though we came from different places and different backgrounds.  I thought that it was a great way to get to know and understand each other.

Reflection of "Mapping Childhood Home/Community"

One of the first things that we did in our day book was draw a map of the neighborhood we grew up in.   Once we were finished, we were instructed to write a piece about our memories in that neighborhood.  Most of the time when it's 8 o'clock in the morning my brain is a little slow to process things, but on this morning when I was asked to write this piece I was immediately excited to begin.  I was so excited to write about the neighborhood that I grew up in because I have such great memories of it and had a blast as a kid growing up there.

Once I began writing, my thoughts flowed so easily and I wish I had more time to write because I had so much more to say.  The more and more that I wrote the better of a mood I got in.  Thinking about all of the good times that I had growing up in that neighborhood as a kid just made me so happy.  My creative juices were flowing and I couldn't put the pencil down.


When it was time to stop writing I put my pencil down but my mind didn't stop wondering.  I just couldn't stop thinking about all of the fun times I had.  I wanted to go back to the pool and play sharks and minos for hours at a time just baking in the sun.  I wanted to go to the Kent's house for a giant game of capture the flag once the sun went down.  I wanted to go to PJ's house where we would order pizza and stay up all night.  I wanted to go back to the times when I didn't have a worry in the world.  This piece got me thinking about how great of a childhood I had and how I wouldn't change it for anything.

A little bit about me...

Hey! I'm Tanner Murphy and I am from Charlotte, North Carolina.  I went to Providence Senior High School in the south Charlotte area.  I grew up playing sports and I always had a love for soccer.  I played competitive, travel soccer for many years.  I am the youngest of three girls and we are all best friends.  Growing up in a home with two older sisters was amazing.  We shared everything! We each had a love for fashion.  Living in a house with two sisters meant that I had two extra closets to raid.  I love shopping and looking for new clothes!  I am a Pinterest freak!  In my free time I enjoy looking at all of the style boards on Pinterest.