RE_5539

I could identify with so much of chapter three. I read and then reread much of this chapter, not because it was difficult, but because it resonated with me. Like the author, I was reared, in the Southeast, to be a "good girl." Her descriptions of vacation Bible School and Kool Aid reawakened memories I'd locked away. Much of this chapter helped me recall my own childhood and my personal experiences with literacy in ways I'd not consciously identified before reading this text. I liked Jane Miller's quote that described children learning to read and write, not in a vacuum, but in relationship to "learning to engage with the cuture and with specific and specialised practices in that culture."

Both hooks and Hicks describe their early experiences in terms of magic and beauty even though their day to day realities aslo included pain and alienation. I appreciated the piece from hooks' memoir that describes her awakening awareness of the unspoken "fear" regarding whites. I could (mis)quote her replacing "white" with "black" and that would describe my recollections of the unspoken distrust communicated to me as a child regarding "black folk"( I grew up in the South). Because I have trusted, and hoped, that I no longer adhered to that kind of belief, I've not allowed myself to look back honestly at my early experiences and how those experiences shaped my learning. It can be painful to be honest with oneself!

I also identified with Hicks' description (from hooks' memoir) of the mother's explanation that black is a woman's color. I too learned that I could wear black when I was "old enough." I too longed to be grown, to be able to wear black, to embrace my own sexuality as an adult. I,like hooks and Hicks, and like Laurie, turned to fantasy to relieve the boredom of my reality. I too escaped into the worlds of imaginative literature. I knew all the original tales of the Brothers Grimm as well as the tales of King Arthur. As a college student, I was surprised to learn that many of my fellow students were not familiar with these tales. I guess I assumed that everyone loved fantasy as I did as a child! I don't recall escaping any harsh realities but I do think that I was seeking an escape from the boredom of my mundane (lower) middle class existence, summed up by Hicks when she states that "Children went to school to work and to do what the teachers told them to do, just as adults accepted that everyday work was often routine, boring, and controlled by others."

As a child, I perhaps embraced the class identity my mother desired for me. My mother, like the mother Ernaux describes, valued learning, education, self-improvement. Like Hicks, I excelled in school partly to please my parents. Unlike Laurie, I was not persuaded to embrace the domestic ideal over the academic one. But like Laurie, some of my female students often speak of preferring motherhood to higher education. Hicks reminds us that teaching requires our "situated readings" of our students, but she also points out that act compels us to draw on our own histories. In the margin of my book, I noted that such powerful influence both "frightens and excites" me.I hope that I can be wise in my "readings" as I carefully LISTEN to my students.

Betsy Baldwin