Chapter 3

Our reading for this class once again brought into light an issue that I’m sure many other students were not aware of. This time it was about what the majority of people think of as literacy nowadays, which is simply the ability to read books. But in today’s society, being a highly literate adult (or adolescent) means having the ability to do much more than just read novels. We need to be able to peruse the loads of information on the internet, and decipher the good from the bad; we need to be up-to-date on current events and politics, and have a strong hold of what is going on in the world today. However, high school classes rarely teach their students to be literate in these ways- they stay true to their strict schedules of “traditional” teaching, only allowing the students to learn these further things on their own time. With teenagers’ hectic schedules and crazy lives, they rarely take their own time to learn how to do these things, and thus their literacy capabilities falter as a result. The chapter really interested me when it pointed out that something as far removed from books as video gaming is considered a solid teacher of learning and literacy. I never thought of video games in this way, and in fact I usually think of teens who constantly play as merely wasting their time. This chapter made me realize that these games are further tools for the adolescent mind to learn by, and in the future there may be even more unique ways for individuals to become more literate.