From Pencils to Pixels - Essay Example

My parents are both hard-working people who had little spare time when I was young. My father in particular was away from home a great deal of the time, and I saw very little of him when I was very young, because I was generally in bed before he came home from work. My earliest and best memories are of the evenings when he would creep into my room and tell me a bedtime story. I remember the smell of cigarettes and chemicals on his clothes, and I know he enjoyed telling me stories because he used to make silly voices for all the characters.

This is probably why I learned to love books, and perhaps why I enjoy poetry and drama also. We used to have a boxed set of fairy tales based on the Walt Disney cartoons, and these were my favorites. I thought there was something magical in storybooks and I used to have vivid dreams about the fantastic places in these stories. Writing was connected with pictures for me at first. I used to make pasta paintings, finger paintings, and sponge paintings and my mother encouraged me to make shapes like the letters of the alphabet.

In my bedroom there was a poster with the letters of the alphabet in the shape of different animals. To this day I connect the letter d with a donkey and p with a parrot! I could write my name before I went to school, and I remember that I did not like writing with wax crayons. They are difficult to use because they do not have a well defined point, and I hated the way that the colors rubbed off on each other. In my pre-school years, then, reading and writing were connected in my mind with happy times in the family and I had a generally positive attitude towards literacy.

I was happy to experiment with any new writing tools, although I do remember being in disgrace for a few days after a little experiment with some indelible markers and the wallpaper in the hallway. When I went to school I was surprised at the number of children in the class who did not seem to know what to do with a book or a pencil and paper. I was not the best student when it came to writing, and in fact spelling is still not my strongest point, but at least I was willing to learn and I liked writing much better than math or science.

Sometimes I used to buy notebooks and letter writing sets with my pocket money and my favorite toy was a post office set with tiny stamps and envelopes. The method of teaching reading in my first school involved a series of graded reading books which my parents were supposed to read with me. I hated these books because nothing exciting ever happened in them. They were usually domestic tales about children and dogs, or famous extracts from history. I remember there was one interminable story about pioneers but I don’t remember what happened in it.

In my mind at that time, there was reading and writing for school, which was by definition not pleasurable, and then there was reading and writing for fun, which I did at home or in the local library and this very definitely did give me pleasure. Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I think this was an unhelpful distinction, but at the time this was how I saw it. I came rather late to computers, compared to some other children in my class at school. I preferred music when I was a young teenager, and I used to listen to music until late into the night.

In general I think that my awareness of language comes mainly through listening, and this may explain why I prefer television or YouTube when I am looking for facts or explanations. It was not until the last