RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2010)

Hi! My name is Clyde and I teach pre-kindergarten at Northwood Elementary in Guilford County. I have taught pre-k for eight years. I began my teaching career in kindergarten and spent a little over nine years in that grade before quitting. I then finished the last three months of a school year in a second-grade class. Like some others have posted, I have my National Board Certification as an Early Childhood Generalist. I successfully renewed it a couple of years ago and it was so much easier than the initial process.

An unusual hobby of mine is collecting anything pertaining to hippos. I currently have over 200 items in my collection.

One of my big passions is traveling. If I have the opportunity to hop on a plane, I do it! I have been to Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, China, Canada, Mexico, and many states within our own country. My favorite place to travel over the past several years has been Denver, Colorado. I’ve been there eight times – three of those being within the past year.

As mentioned in the title, I am gay. It took me a long time to come to grips with that fact based on my conservative upbringing, but I now see my sexual orientation as an integral part of who I am. You may be wondering why I bring that up in this introduction to the class, but I see it fitting in with the topics of race, class, and gender that this class is scheduled to cover. During my years as a student, I do not remember seeing anyone who was gay portrayed in the literature being read in my classes. It was not until I was out of school that I found out that such literature was out there.

Another reason I mention my sexual orientation is that it greatly affected my development in the language arts. Because I was “in the closet” and afraid to voice my innermost thoughts, I developed a preference for listening over speaking, especially in groups. I was always afraid to offer my opinions because I didn’t want to say something that others might disagree with (such as the subject of homosexuality), thus causing them to dislike me. Also, I developed a strong preference for writing because this mode of communication allowed me the opportunity to carefully consider my words before responding, unlike with speaking. I considered this to be a much safer alternative. Lastly, I grew to love books because they offered me an escape. Through reading, I could be someone else and experience new places and things that, otherwise, would be unavailable to me.

While growing up, I was a good reader and was always in the top reading group in my class. I had a peculiar habit of reading books upside-down, which I remember getting in trouble for in fourth grade. Unlike others have mentioned, however, I did not see a lot of reading done at home. My mother always read the Bible in her bedroom before going to sleep and my dad would read the newspaper. That was about it. There were not a lot of books in my house, either, but I do remember being able to check books out from the church library, the school library, and the bookmobile that came during the summer months. Some of my favorite books were part of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew collections.

My decision to enroll in the master’s program in reading education involved an experience I had with a second-grade student at my school. His dad asked me if I would tutor the child. I told the dad that I would do it, but as I worked with the child more and more, I realized that I really did not know how to proceed with him past a certain point. From teaching pre-k and kindergarten, I knew a lot about teaching letters, their sounds, etc., but I was not very familiar with what I should be doing with a struggling second-grader. After a month, the child’s parents had him tested at Sylvan and the director there recommended that he should receive tutoring two or three times a week. I told the parents I could not commit to that amount of time so they began having him tutored at Sylvan. The experience left me with the desire to know what to do with students beyond what I do with my pre-kindergartners in their endeavors to learn how to read. I don’t feel this was something that was adequately addressed in my undergraduate work to become a teacher.

Clyde Rice