>>Brian: Ok so my name is Brian Bailie, I live out in Syracuse New York and also in California, so between two places at the moment, which is being a grad student. My first probably earliest memory of literacy that is well defined, would come from reading. And in particular, my mother was very very excited about reading to me every night with a series of books that I don't actually remember what they were called, but she would always call them the (00:28.2) stories. And that was the first thing I really remember was her reading to me in the evenings, after that, I graduated to the Hardy Boy series, and those were at least hardback covers. And looking back, because I'll go home and my parents will still have them. What's amazing is that these are really books that she would have liked as a kid or things from her time period. Because everything on the cover was totally 50s. The artwork, the idea, who's represented, and even the stories themselves are this sort of postwar Americana. The Bobby Twins I remember there was this one where there was like a haystack, and they're (01:08.9) in from the barn to the haystack. And it's just this overall goodness, like nothing can ever go wrong, and it had all this sort of big moralistic overtones. And so the Hardy Boys was the same thing, it was the classic 50s not even the 70s covers like two guys (01:20.0). But the classic 50s haircut that shows like the Venture Brothers make fun of now. And we used to sit there and read those, and then I started reading them to her, and then I was also going to a private school and we were doing phonics, so then I started sounding out words. And that's basically my earliest literacy narrative, it's the first thing I can really think of. Writing came a lot, I remember reading first before writing, writing came more in the sort of skill and grill stuff that was really a part of being, going to a heavy handed sort of phonics training private school that was religious based. It was fundamentalist Christian religious based actually. So they had a very sort of strict way of teaching writing almost that Napoleon fashion of "You will do this at this time. You will use these lines, you will stop writing at this time." And you know, it was really about penmanship at that point, and it wasn't until much later, probably not until, yeah Public schools, where it was suddenly less about form and grammar, and more about writing to say something. You know like "What's your opinion on this?" Doing current events stuff, and then the sections where you would do creative writing. And that was the first time I actually had the writing (02:39.0) going on. So once that happened I guess that was the full package. And you know it's really strange, but when I look back on it, what I see connected to my own sort of literacy and the way that I was brought up with what reading does, is that it connects to why I do the work I do now. Because even I try to be this sort of jaded, you know sort of post-modernist you know kind of, or at least if nothing else sort of like a Marxist. It's hard for me to not see things as, there are egalitarian purposes behind literacy. Literacy should be used for good things. Literacy is something that if you give it to somebody they can actually make choices in their own situation that would benefit them. So I think that's why I went into Rhet-Comp I wanted to continue to work in, I find the classroom exciting, and I still try to foreground that idea that I'm teaching you something useful. You can think about it, you can write, you can talk back. You don't have to just be passive and take it in. So yeah, I think your literacy really has an effect on what you end up doing. And I end up seeing the world, so you know the whole cost of language and... language and thought, language and idea about how society works is really important. >>Speaker: And the Hardy Boys. >>Brian: And the Hardy Boys, you know, because the good guys win, and I figure we're the good guys. (Laughter) So Eventually we'll win right?