asavarese – Composition and Writing With Sources

Life Saving VR

Kelsey Wolfsheimer, Alaina Savarese, Lauren Dawkins, & Kail-La Smith

Intro/Purpose: Kelsey

Our product is a simulation, virtual reality training for first responders including both EMTs and Firefighters. It is an interactive experience where virtual reality systems such as Vive or Oculus, would be used as the trainees go through a variety of interactive high pressure simulations where they are doing what they would do in real life through the gaming system. Our training would include all the basics of first responder training, which consists of 7 modules for EMTs and the necessary training for the firefighters along with the basic EMT training as well.

Trainees need this product because it is a hands-on, real-life simulation training that is cost-efficient and doesn’t put lives in danger. According to two articles, 70% of all firefighters are volunteers (“U.S. fire department profile” Haynes), while “EMS volunteers answer close to half of the nation’s 911 calls – possibly up to 90% in the most rural states” (“Why volunteers are critical to the future of EMS.” Magee). This training would make it easier for the volunteers to get proper training since a large amount of the volunteers most likely don’t have a ton of money to dish out. This product will also give the instructors a better understanding of the trainee, by determining if they can handle real life situations without cracking under pressure. Some people are good test takers but fail in the real world, while others succeed in real life situations, but are bad test takers. This product would allow the instructors to see how efficient the trainees are at each of the tasks that are necessary rather than just solely remembering terms from the lecture.

In order to create the most efficient training simulation, we need to ensure that we cover every part that is vital to training. The EMT training involves seven different training modules. The first is the preparatory module. This includes the introduction to Emergency Medical Care, the well-being of the EMT Basic, medical/legal and ethical issues, the human body, baseline vitals, SAMPLE history, and the lifting and moving of patients. The second module is known as the airway module. It includes mouth-to-mask with supplemental oxygen, airway maintenance (Oral, Nasal and Suctioning), and oxygen administration. The next module is known as the trauma assessment and documentation module and includes scene size-up, initial assessment, focused history and physical exams on trauma patients, focused history and physical exam on medical patients, detailed physician exam, on-going assessment, communications and documentation. The next module is known as the medical assessment module and includes general Pharmacology, respiratory emergencies, cardiovascular emergencies, diabetes/altered mental status, allergies, poisoning/overdose, environmental emergencies, behavioral emergencies and Obstetrics/Gynecology. The next module, known as trauma emergencies, covers bleeding and shock, soft tissue injuries, musculoskeletal care and injuries to the head and spine. The next one is dedicated to pediatric and geriatric emergencies, including infants and children as well as geriatric patients. The last module is known as operations. This section covers ambulance operations, gaining access and overviews. There is also an option of an eighth module called advanced airways, that our training will not cover (“EMT Training” EMTResources.com).

The firefighter training will cover all of the basic EMT training, listed above, as well as the necessary training that is required for firefighters. Each station requires a different amount of training and different training subjects, but the majority follows the same basic training objectives. Their training includes learning how to deal with building fires, how to prevent and fight fires, how to treat people injured in a fire, and how to use fire equipment such as ladders, hoses, axes, fire extinguishers and chain saws. They also have to learn how to manage hazardous materials, inspect smoke detectors, how to conduct search and rescue procedures as well as learn about fire science and local building codes. The last part of their basic training is learning how to react to challenging situations like fires in subways, high-rises, cars or crawl spaces (“Fireman Training Programs and Requirements.” Study.com).

We are directing our project towards two different audiences. Our primary audience is instructors for first responder training and training centers. If training centers had this technology then more people would want to go to these centers since it could potentially save lives, be cost efficient, and provide better lessons so trainees can get a better understanding of what they are learning. It would benefit instructors as well because they would run the simulations along with giving short lectures while cutting down the amount of time that they have to teach lectures.This simulation would also help put a good rep on the specific training center and the instructors that use it. Their trainees would be more prepared in real life situations and not panic once they are in the workforce compared to the trainees who didn’t have simulation training. The secondary audience is for people who are looking to become EMTs and Firefighters. They want to be able to find the best training center where their life isn’t at such a high risk and want to make sure they learn as much as they possibly can. With so many people being kinesthetic and visual learners, this simulation would be sure to help them retain the knowledge they learn, resulting in more efficient and confident first responders. This would also help the volunteers who are looking for a good but cost efficient training program and with this technology the amount of money needed for training would be cut down significantly.

Learning Outcomes: Kail-La

Our simulation will provide both physical and intellectual development for the users resulting with educational, technical, and employability outcome. The application will provide the necessary basic knowledge for all first responders and firefighters and training. In addition, our application will also provide technical knowledge on specific fire preventions, behaviors, and protection techniques for firefighters. Also, it will provide specific technical use of equipment, tasks as well as skills for both an EMT and/or firefighter. Our application allows one to pick up the necessary skills that employers want you have, specific achievements, understandings, and the personal thrive that makes an individual more likely to gain employment, and success as an EMT and/or firefighter. Our application is made to specifically educate a person in order to become successful in the future. The outcomes will be assessed through quizzes after each section and required hands-on performance that the user must demonstrate individually or in pairs. At the end of the application, there will be a combination of all the sections and hands-on activities for both, essential EMT’s and firefighters.

User Experience/User Interface: Alaina

There are similar programs to ours that exist like the 360 Immersive and SimX. The 360 Immersive application is for your phone and it is only a simulation that the viewer would observe with no interaction (360 Immersive). They also do not focus solely on first responder training. The SimX program is a simulation with a little more hands-on activity (SimX). These programs both lack a fully immersive world with high involvement in their experience. This can be done with our application using the HTC Vive. It is very important that the user has access to the visor, the two controllers, and the motion sensors to get the full experience.

We want to have immersive basic training sessions for first responders that would include CPR training, checking blood pressure and vitals, and placing patients on a spinal board. We also believe that it is important for trainees to have situational training like extracting a patient from a car wreck, rescuing a person from a burning building, or operating emergency equipment.

This is how we imagine our program to operate: Each student will have their own unique avatar similar to that in Ernest Cline’s book, Ready Player One. The student alone or working in partners will put on the VR gear in range of the motion sensors located in the classroom and their instructor will choose which learning experience they are going to do. The student(s) will be fully immersed in that situation whether they are just receiving a dispatch call or learning how to set a broken bone. The instructor will be able to monitor their actions by watching her computer screen which will display what the scenario her students have been placed. This will allow her to be able to assist the students and provide feedback. We want our program to assist in the training of firefighters and EMT’s and be as realistic as possible with real-world experiences.

Implementation Strategy: Kail-La

Our goal isn’t to create an application that’s too expensive. However, cost for the use of the simulation will range between $60 to $100 dollars. Sixty dollars, being the lowest for basic review of basic hands-on activities and one hundred dollars, being the potential highest for use of the entire application. Solution to the price being too high is a better price deal, if the company, group, etc. buys the application once, specifically for use of a large group of people. Technological constraints consists of companies not as equipped or advanced enough for the use of the application. Also, buildings where the application will be used may need to be more advanced and adequate to the size and space needed. However, upgrading one’s company towards a more futuristic setting could be a solution. In order to reach out to our customers, we will advertise and promote our application as much as we can through advertisements.

Long-term Vision: Kelsey

To keep our prototype focused and manageable we have to limit it in several ways. The first way we are limiting our prototype is by doing a hands on, interactive simulation that teaches skills based that are necessary for basic EMT and Firefighter training. This simulation will exclude lessons and will just test the actual skills that are necessary for passing the training. Our prototype won’t completely eliminate lectures or actual class time, but will cut down the time and enhance the lessons by performing what you learned in a real-life situation, but without endangering anyone’s life. We are also going to limit this to interactive experiences only. This means it will have to run on a system like Vive or Oculus and there won’t be any interactive lessons for phones, with the cardboard boxes, where you could use the movement of your head to answer questions or look around, etc. We want this to be like a high pressure, real-life situation where you need to actually act and deal with the situation like you would do in real life.

The next stage of development involves a variety of steps. The first step would be to determine how each training objective would be shown and covered throughout the simulation. Once is it completed we would need to figure out how it would be tested in the actual simulation training and how to depict the variety of situations that are needed to cover each objective. There has to be a variety of situations in which the trainee will be placed during the simulation because not everything in the real world is the same situation, so the different training experiences need to have some sort of variety. We also have to determine how to make the training interactive. Will there be “what would you do?” type quizzes where the situation plays out solely based on what answer they chose, along with the interactive parts where they have to use their own hands and feet? Or should it be only interaction based? Once these developmental factors are determined, we then need to test the simulation trainings throughout the country to make sure it is user friendly, works well, and make sure that there are no problems with how the simulation runs.

We have a lot that we would want to accomplish in our five year plan. The first would be getting the program tested, approved and then out to training centers for the simulation training to begin. Once the interactive simulation training is working well, we would eventually make a cheaper program for trainees to use to help study for the actual simulation and for real-life tests. This program would be able to be used on a phone and in a cardboard box. It can also be more a “what would you do” type of quiz in the simulation where the answer the trainee gives is what determines what happens next. This would also be more practice for firefighters and EMTs. We would also like to include a more in depth training for Intermediate EMTs and Paramedics, since the Basic EMT training doesn’t cover what they need to know.

References

360immersive.com. (2017). 360immersive – – VR Training – Virtual Reality. [online] Available at: https://360immersive.com/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Cline, E. (2011). Ready player one. New York: Crown.

EMS1. (2017). Why volunteers are critical to the future of EMS. [online] Available at: http://www.ems1.com/community-awareness/articles/2169080-Why-volunteers-are-critical-to-the-future-of-EMS/. [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Emt-resources.com. (2017). EMT Resources – for New and Experienced EMTs. [online] Available at: http://www.emt-resources.com/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Nfpa.org. (2017). NFPA report – U.S. fire department profile. [online] Available at: http://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/Fire-statistics/The-fire-service/Administration/US-fire-department-profile. [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Simxar.com. (2017). SimX | Virtual and Augmented Reality Medical Training Software. [online] Available at: https://www.simxar.com/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Study.com. (2017). Fireman Training Programs and Requirements. [online] Available at: https://study.com/fireman_training.html [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Storyboard:

Presentation:

https://app.peardeck.com/editor/1SeYDEOu1kPdhcTiw5mX_BdpPrgiupB9N/slides/explanation/0.4232298832630337

Learning A New Language Through Virtual Reality

I believe virtual reality can assist anyone in learning a new language. If you could be completely immersed in a new language it will be easier to catch on and enhance your understanding. My program will use a VR visor and controllers so the user can interact in the game. There will be an instructor in front of you, speaking in any language you wish to learn and at the bottom of the screen there will be subtitles. The user will be able to have a conversation with the instructor and they will respond and correct any mistakes. The user can choose to be in a classroom setting or in a country of choice. There will also be different levels, like beginner, intermediate, and expert.

How Our Education System Can Benefit From Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality has the potential to alter our education system in a positive way by giving access to school to all children, making learning more interactive, and helping students read. VR learning can benefit students at all ages and backgrounds. It can better prepare them for the future in this ever-advancing technological world.

The first way Virtual Reality has the potential to change our education system is by allowing all children across the world to go to school. If every child in the world could put on a visor and a pair of haptic gloves and be able to attend school, the world would be a better place. In Ernest Cline’s novel, Ready Player One, he gives us an idea of what this could be like. The main character, Wade Watts, attends school through a VR program called the OASIS because the real world around him is falling apart due to global warming and extreme poverty. Today in our world, there are still children who want to learn, but cannot attend school because of financial issues, their health, or because of their location. A student who may be bed ridden in a hospital or living in poverty in a third world country could still learn by attending school via VR. With the power of the Internet and Virtual Reality any child can receive they education they deserve.

Another way our education system can benefit from Virtual Reality is by making the curriculum and lessons even more interactive, engaging, and fun. In Ready Player One, Cline introduces an idea that the classrooms in VR could be holodecks meaning one minute the space could look like a regular classroom and the next like Egypt in AD 1922. I agree that these virtual field trips could work in our education system by allowing students to experience things that they otherwise could not, like going to outer space. There are some students who learn better by being hands-on, so multiple field trips would help visual learners. It would enhance their understandings of their lessons and make them more exciting.

The last approach to how Virtual Reality could change the way students learn is through reading. Reading is an important part of our lives and it is a huge part of how we learn. Right now, a great amount of reading is done online, but there are still people who prefer to read on paper. According to Ferris Jabr, paper texts still have an advantage over online texts and e-readers are working so hard to resemble paper books, but imagine with VR, we could hold and see an actual e-book. It would look like a regular paper book, but the whole thing would be just a rendering in a virtual space. Reading a book in Virtual Reality would be just the same as reading a physical book. There would also be no limit to how many books we could carry with us. Students could access an unlimited number of books and use them for their classes.

In conclusion, I believe Virtual Reality can be a good tool for students to use to enhance their education and prepare them for the world. The Internet connects us all and with the help of VR, we all can be connected and interact even more.

Works Cited

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player One. Broadway Books, 2011.

Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American, 11 Apr. 2013.

Aria

I wanted my avatar, Aria, to look sophisticated and determined to win Halliday’s prize. Also, I didn’t want to dress her up too much because being a gunter is hard work. I chose purple for the glasses and her shirt because that is my favorite color. The glasses add to the sophisticated look by making her seem intelligent. As for her long, brown hair, I chose that because I just like long hair. She doesn’t have any really girly features like lipstick or eyeliner. I felt like that would add to her being more invested in the game rather than her looks. Lastly, I wanted my avatar to be female because I feel like not that many women play video games or are interested in traditionally male oriented activities. So go girl power!

Chatlink Session with Sorrento

Wade’s OASIS avatar, Parzival, has joined a Chatlink session with the head of Innovative Online Industries, Nolan Sorrento. Sorrento wants Parzival to join him and IOI to help him find the easter egg in Halliday’s program, OASIS. He gives Parzival two offers to try to convince him to join which include money and a job offer. Parzival is not interested in these offers because he hates the IOI. Then the situation gets tense after he rejects Sorrento’s first two offers. Sorrento reveals that he knows Parzival’s real name, Wade Watts, and that he knows where he lives. Sorrento makes one last proposal to Wade; either give up what he knows about the hunt for the egg or die.

What would you have done in this situation? Would you have told Sorrento what you knew and possibly save the lives of the people who died in the explosion? Or would you have chosen Wade’s route and thought Sorrento was going to try to kill you either way?

Youngsters Use Technology for Reading

Incorporating technology in education should start in elementary school. Children today are growing up with all kinds of new technology, which is very different from when my generation was growing up. We should embrace it and show our young students how to use it effectively for learning. The digital age, such as reading online, is a big part of modern life and incorporating this learning tool within the educational system at an early age will only enhance comprehension skills. Educators can do this by teaching children how to annotate online articles, limit multitasking, avoid distractions, and make reading online more engaging.

The first way teachers can help their students better comprehend texts when they read an e-book is by using the website, Hypothesis. This website is used to bring the traditional form of highlighting and writing in the margins to screens. If we can teach elementary students how to annotate books online then they will be better prepared for the future will be less likely to skim read. When an article is uploaded to Hypothesis, there are tools to highlight, add hyperlinks, and just add personal notes into the article.

A screenshot of a highlighted article on Hypothesis.

A screenshot of personal notes on Hypothesis.

According to La Farge, readers that are given a text on a screen do not comprehend what they have read as well as someone who reads the same text on paper. In fact, people are more likely to skim an online article because they have become so used to the Internet being fast and getting information right away. Hypothesis can engage young readers in deep reading and make the note-taking fun. I know using Hypothesis helped me in my English class in college and I wish I had been shown this process sooner in my academic career.

Another way educators can improve their students’ comprehension skills is by limiting multitasking in the classroom. Multitasking has been proven to slow productivity, according to Goldhill. She says, “attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity.” Let’s say a teacher is conducting an English lesson and a student is reading a book, unrelated to the subject of the class, while the lesson is going on. That student will not remember much from the lesson or be able to completely focus on their book because their attention was divided. If we can train students at a young age not to attempt to do more than one task at a time, it will better prepare them for understanding texts in the future. Educators can set designated times for reading and have all their students adhere to that schedule. It is easier to concentrate on a book when everyone else is being quiet and not getting distracted by other tasks.

Likewise, distractions when students are using the Internet is also a problem when it comes to students’ education. Technology can help with this, even though it is one of the causes of distractions. As Goldhill says, our mornings are spent checking emails, scrolling through Facebook, and Googling questions. These notifications are popping up on our phones or on our computers and before we know it, we have forgotten what we originally had planned to accomplish in the day. Elementary schools are full of distractions with yelling children, colorful images, and even the classroom pet can be disruptive. Elementary school teachers can at least limit interruptions when their students read online by installing software to block advertisements and block messages that mean to draw their attention away from the task at hand. I can agree that it would definitely be worth it to have such programs to block everything that interrupts my online reading experience.

The last way the education system can help students with reading on the Internet is by making online texts more interactive. Children would grasp reading on screens much more effectively if it were hands-on. As Jabr says, some forms of electronic readings are meant to be read on a tablet or computer; they rely on scrolling and clicking. With that said, I don’t see why we can’t use interactive e-books to engage students in the words. It’s not so different from when I was younger and using my low-tech Leapfrog at home to help me better comprehend what I was reading. Elementary schools should get students used to scrolling and tapping on words in e-books so that they will carry that excitement for reading with them throughout their educational career.

Educators for young children have an important role in their students’ lives. It is in elementary school that a child’s love for learning begins. I believe we have a responsibility to show our young students how to use all of this new technology to their advantage. Incorporating more technology in schools and using them as educational tools will help students succeed further down the road.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, Jul. 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ Accessed 11 Oct 2017.

Goldhill, Olivia. “Neuroscientists Say Multitasking Literally Drains the Energy Reserves of Your Brain.” Quartz, 3 Jul, 2016, https://qz.com/722661/neuroscientists-say-multitasking-literally-drains-the-energy-reserves-of-your-brain/ Accessed 11 Oct. 2017.

Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American, 11 Apr. 2013, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ Accessed 11 Oct. 2017.

La Farge, Paul. “The Deep Space of Digital Reading.” Nautilus, 7 Jan. 2016, http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-deep-space-of-digital-reading. Accessed 11 Oct 2017.

Ferris Jabr Has A Point

The author of “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”, is Ferris Jabr. According to his personal website “Ferrisjabr”, he is a writer from Portland, Oregon with a MA degree in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science degree from Tufts University (“ABOUT”). He was a staff editor at Scientific American and he has written for other magazines, like New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Outside. He seems to have a great amount of knowledge in writing and science to be able to compose this kind of article. Something else that is compelling that makes him more credible is that he went to college with Maryanne Wolf and he cites her in his article.

Maryanne Wolf, Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University.

He might have taken her class which brings me to believe that he has a passion for this topic of reading online versus paper. In an interview between Khalil Cassimally and Jabr, he states that his father was a physicist and would always answer his science questions about how the world works when he was younger (“An interview with Ferris Jabr”). His wonder for science started at a young age and, during the same interview, he later declares his mind was built for learning about and explaining science.

Since Jabr wrote this article for a magazine called, Scientific American, it makes sense that he wishes to grab the attention of scientists and other people interested in science. He does this by backing up his claims with experiments. He uses Anne Mangen, a college professor from the University of Stravanger for an example. She conducted a study of seventy-two tenth grade students in which half of these students read a text online and the other half read the same text on paper. The conclusion was that the students who read the text on the computer performed worse on the comprehension test than the students who had a paper copy. Jabr also uses quotes from a credible source, psychologist and scientist, Maryanne Wolf. She says that she wishes to keep the traditional experiences of reading and somehow reflect that in digital reading (“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”). His audience would also be middle-aged, middle class, and has at least some college experience based off the advertisements in the margins.

Squarespace is a software you can download to help you build your own website.

This advertisement shows a program for starting your own website and for the most part, you need some college experience to start your own business and run it on your own. A secondary audience for Jabr’s article could be college students who are doing research. His article gives them explanations of his claim and provides many sources for them to do further research. College students want articles that are credible so that they can use them. Jabr provides this.

Chegg is a textbook rental company based in Santa Clara, California that also gives students access to homework help, online tutoring, and matches to scholarships and internships.

There are also advertisements for college students. This one is promoting a program called Chegg which connects students to the textbooks they need for school (“Fact Sheet”).

Ferris Jabr’s main claim in this article is to compare the nature of reading online to reading in paper form. He states that he tries to explain how reading on screens is different from reading on paper and asks if we should be worried about dividing our attention between both mediums (“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”). Throughout his article he uses evidence to explain how both devices for reading affects us. One comparison Jabr makes is that on paper texts a reader can focus on a single page of the book while recognizing how much further there is to go in the whole text. Although, when reading on a screen the reader might be continually scrolling without knowing where they are in the entirety of the text (“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”). Jabr also claims later that we should embrace the advantages of both e-books and paper books. He states there have been successful articles online from the New York Times, Washington Post, and ESPN that rely on scrolling and could not have the same interaction with the reader in print. On the contrary, he projects that “When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage” (“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”).

An award-winning, global magazine about current discoveries and technological innovations.

This article is located in an online magazine called Scientific American. It is an award-winning, source of information about current discoveries and technological innovations (Scientific American). There are other scientific articles to the right of “The Reading Brain” under the tab called “Read This Next”.

“Read This Next” link on the right side of the article.

Jabr possibly chose this medium because his whole article reflects reading online. It makes sense that he would post his article on the Web since online reading has become more popular in recent years. In addition, his article is not too long which goes along with his theory that people have a harder time comprehending texts online. Maybe he wanted to try to eliminate that by not making his article too long as to lose the readers interest. Jabr’s article was probably meant to be read a little more seriously, but it was not too difficult of a read that a person who studied fashion instead of science would have a problem.

“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens” is mostly a scholarly article. More specific, it is a scientific article. It discusses a new perspective on an emerging theory which is online reading. It meets the reader’s expectations by backing his thoughts up with scientific experiments and quoting doctors and researchers.

Jabr’s article uses visual rhetoric to help get the audience thinking about reading and what devices we use to read. The picture you see when you first open the article is of two Kindles, one with a keyboard and one without. The image is black and white and that contributes to the overall scholarly theme. There are some distractions that can be noticed when reading his article. For instance, there is an advertisement that pops up on the right side of the article.

The ad changes between “Chegg” and “Squarespace” when you reload the article. It is very distracting at first, but when you scroll down far enough, you can no longer see the advertisement.

Jabr’s article persuaded me to grasp the concept that we can use both screens and paper to read so it was very successful. The examples he used are factual and honest. There was enough evidence to convince me that there are positives to both ways of reading and that we should use them interchangeably.

Works Cited

Cassimally, Khalil. “An Interview with Ferris Jabr.” Scitable, 16 Nov. 2010, https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/interviewing_science_writers_ferris_jabr Accessed 26 Sep 2017.

Chegg. Chegg Inc, 2017, https://www.chegg.com/factsheet Accessed 26 Sep 2017.

DiBiaggio, John. “Meet the Team.” Tufts University, 2017, https://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/team/wolf.htm Accessed 26 Sep 2017.

Scientific American. Springer Nature, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-american/ Accessed 26 Sep 2017.

An Old Woman and A Cold Woman

My name is Alaina and I am a student at Stevenson University majoring in fashion merchandising. I am living at home with my parents, Kelly and Vince, my sister, Alicia, our dog, Lucy, and our cat, Cici. We live in an older, suburban neighborhood in Baltimore county, nothing too fancy. In the evenings, I work at Macy’s as a sales associate. This is the first time I am attending school while working, so I am learning how to manage my time more efficiently. There was research done at New Georgetown University in 2015 that showed seventy percent of students nationwide worked while in school. This makes me feel more hopeful that it can be done. The reason I have made it this far in my educational career, started a long time ago when I was learning to read and write.

Both of my parents had the biggest impact on teaching me how to read and how to write. My dad has dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and he wears glasses. My mom has lighter brown hair, like mine, hazel eyes and she also wears glasses. They both are very literate and it was important for them to share that same love for reading with me. I asked my mom if there was any specific tool or device that really assisted me learn to read and she said when I was in pre-school and kindergarten, she would use these small flashcards with colorful pictures on them to teach me. For instance, a flashcard would have a picture of a red apple on it and typed on the bottom would say “apple”. I was a visual learner, so the word and picture combination helped me remember the object and what it was called. My mom and dad would go through the flashcards with me whenever there was downtime like after they got off work or on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Wondering Bug Mascot by Hongkiat, Aug 16, 2013

The second most important way I learned to read was through books themselves, a great step up from single-worded flashcards. My parents said they would read to me usually before bed when I was about three years old. My dad told me that I always had to pick a book that rhymed and was humorous. My favorite books were, There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow, and, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, both by Lucille Colandro. They were both hardcover, very colorful, and came with a plush doll of the main character, the old lady. Basically, in both books, this elderly woman with a grey bun in her hair inhales these things and nobody knows why. In There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow, the grey-haired lady ingests the proper tools to build a snowman. First, she swallows some snow, then a pipe, some coal, a hat, a stick, and finally a scarf. The end result is that she hiccups and everything flies out and lands perfectly as a snowman. In the other book, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, she ends up having to keep ingesting critters so that they will catch one another. She gets a spider to catch the fly, a bird to catch the spider and this keeps escalating until eventually she has to swallow a cow. My parents said they enjoyed reading these two books to me and that I savored the ludicrous stories and the rhyming words. I would recognize words I had seen on the flashcards and seeing how they were put together, forming sentences, was extremely helpful on my journey to learning to read.

The last technique that helped me learn to read and to write was television. I remember sitting on the green carpet of the living room floor at home waiting for my favorite shows on our old box television set. My mom told me that when I was younger I was really into Dora the Explorer. Dora the Explorer is a cartoon about a little girl with brown hair who ventures out on missions with help from her monkey friend, Boots. She also has other animated friends that assist her on her adventures such as, Map and Backpack. Throughout the series she taught me a ton of vocabulary in English and Spanish. This strengthened the words I already knew and showed me how to use them differently. The show also used music and math to keep my interest and make learning fun.

I believe these devices I used prepared me for where I am now. Many of the above techniques I used, I still use today. I continue to read all kinds of books, watch documentaries, and use flashcards to study vocabulary words. My college studies about the fashion industry have already brought me new experiences. I am going to be taking a business writing course and I am reading a History of Costume textbook which comes with many new terms. My foundation of literacy skills continues to improve every day.