Chapter 10

The portion of this chapter which interested me the most was how the ACCESS class got to hear from a number of different professionals about the importance of being literate in all of their different work places. This notion may not be completely obvious to many high school students, especially those who are on a vocational track and know that they do not plan on attending college. For these teens, some who plan on working as say a mechanic or a construction worker, they may not think that they need to be highly literate, and these types of students will be less motivated to learn oftentimes. As this chapter highlights, every profession has an area where training and developing skills is essential, and having the ability to be literate and capable of advancing your skills for an ever-changing world can be the difference between keeping said job or being replaced. I hope that the students I will have in my future classes will see the relevancy of having these literacy abilities. Many students will always question why they have to do certain things- why do I need to learn this science theory, or what does it matter if this country fought that in that war? Well, if my students need reasoning behind what they are learning in my English class, then I can simply tell them that they need these invaluable literacy capabilities to be able to have a future career. Some may try and argue back, saying that whatever job they plan on getting doesn’t require any reading or literateness at all. But the fact of the matter is that every job requires these basic skills, and I can only hope that every student that I have will want to be literate in every subject that they have.