My Literacy in A Whole Time: I am Horrible

Time flew, and everything changed. My brothers were sent to Islamic boarding house when they had finished elementary school; and so was I. We did not draw pictures or write stories anymore; because we had so many things to learn—school courses and dorm courses. This makes me sad, now. I do not think that I have got enough meaningful lessons, honestly. I just did my assignments, I got scores, and then I graduated. Teachers in school gave assignments that I had to always deal with and my dormitory would not care because it had its own rules too. However, I joined many competitions and I have just realized that those competitions were not related to materials or courses that I had been learning in classrooms. The same cases also happened when I was in senior high school. Only, I joined talent-related competition when I was in junior high school—such as story-telling, poem-reading, speech, and role playing—on the contrary, I joined religion-related competitions when I was in senior high school—Al-Qur’an Olympiad (Cerdas Cermat Qur’an or Fahmilul Qur’an), Islamic speech, and so on. But I also joined theater as my extra-school activity—because I was in language department; I wrote role play scripts and did sets of matters dealing with stages and shows. Too many things that I had done realize me, now, that I think I have been lost. I have not really figured out who I am, and what I want to do.

Accepted in English Teacher Education Department, State Islamic University of Surabaya does not really help me. I have been learning English and how to teach English for years; including now. I completely realize that reading and writing are significantly important in learning everything; however, I do not really like it. I have been almost always forcing myself to read and write. Especially both undergraduate and postgraduate programs intend me to read and write so many things—academically and non-academically. Moreover, the home-school literacy connection is just a theory in this state; my parent, family and people around let me learn everything myself as I am seen as an adult now. So, I read materials; do assignments and submit them; then I do the same steps in the next chapter—I do not even blame myself if I forget the sets of things in the previous chapter. Then I begin to questioning myself, “Am I still in the process of literacy practices?” or “Does this mean I have literacy practices in particular time—and in very short time, then I move to other dimension, then my previous literacy practices have possibility to be useless and forgotten?” “If any process of learning and communication can be seen as literacy practices, so we are in literacy practices the whole time—is it true?”

In relating to the meaning of literacy which refers to “the ability to use language and images in rich and varied forms to read, write, listen, speak, view, represent, and think critically about ideas” (Ontario Education, 2004), I am still not really sure about my literacy practices—moreover in academic belongings. I have been sharing my knowledge about English and meeting various kinds of people for years. I have been trying my best, but I am always afraid of letting them stuck in not-meaningful learning. Especially in adult learners’ cases, I have been facing the same difficulties as learner. Linking back to my experience, I feel that I actually did not really get lessons from classrooms. But meaningfully learn from everything around, environment and everything that her father gave. This means that home literacy can strongly help school literacy especially for children in giving meanings for everything that they learn and get from school. Likewise, they can explore more about themselves or even find something new inside them; without changing who they are. This might be the reason why I have not found specific and detail explanation about literacy practice for adult; because building characteristic, constructing personality and connecting home-school literacy practices are mostly happened in children.