At Holloway Elementary School I was considered a good writer and reader. I was a girl who followed directions. I read what I was told. I did all of my assignments. My mother never had to ask me, “Tamara, did you do your homework tonight?” I just did it. My end-of-the-year test scores were always well above average. I was a smart little girl. My literacy, like that of all the children around me, was defined by skills. I learned the skills I needed to function appropriately in school. And I was good at demonstrating those skills.

My parents divorced when I was five years old. At that time, my Orthodox Jewish father converted to Islam and joined a Sufi-Muslim commune in the middle of Texas. He tried to bring my second-generation Holocaust-survivor mother with him, but she refused. As a result, I spent school years with my mother and summers and holidays with my father and his new American-Muslim convert wife and her four children. Four months of every year I lived at Bayt ‘ul Deen, a 200-acre farm, isolated from the rest of society. Unlike me, my stepbrothers and stepsisters never left the commune. At most, they drove two hours to Austin, Texas to visit the Whole Foods to buy brown rice and lentils a few times a year. Otherwise, they remained separate from everyone else.

The children of our commune were schooled on site. Our teachers were our mothers and the mothers of our friends. The women and men who taught us were not trained. Some of them may not have completed high school themselves. After joining the commune, my father taught himself and became fluent in Arabic. He became the Arabic teacher on our “utopian” community. Other men on the commune taught Persian, Urdu, and the history of Islam. My stepmother and the other ladies taught the kids math, reading, and writing. The subjects we studied were non-orthodox, to say the least.

Our Sufi commune was unlike most households in America. We studied subjects most Americans never heard of or even acknowledged. My closest friends were from Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. We ate together, slept together, cooked together, studied together, and prayed together. Together we questioned life and death. We debated world politics, the idea of Americanism, and the problems of our consumer-based world. The more I learned about the world and problems outside of my not-so-typical home, the more disinterested I became in traditional education. That good little schoolgirl became a rebellious intellectual.

As the years passed, my thoughts of college dissipated. Although my Lithuanian grandmother and immigrant German mother emphasized daily the need for education and drilled into me that I would go to college, my fascination with the spiritual world took me away from their lofty higher educational goals. I became absorbed with the grandest questions. I needed to know about my Creator. And I needed to know how I was supposed to function in this world in order to live happily in the after-world. Thinking of death gave me little time to think about the mundane world of school. By the time I entered Amphitheater Middle School in Tucson, my writing took on a new richness that my globally ignorant teachers could not understand. And because of this, they dismissed me.

My teachers’ opinions of me became low. Because they could not understand me, they chose to ignore me. I wrote about outrageous topics such as the benefits of polygamy for women. My teachers continued to write in red ink that I was having major “writing problems." Even so, never once did they come up to me after class to discuss my work. Nor did they try to understand or even question why I was writing so defiantly. At the time, I was proud of my essays. I considered them superior to the other students' work because they were unique and did not conform to traditional academic guidelines. Everyone else followed the rules. They answered the essay questions “correctly.”

In my commune I was taught to vigorously question all ideas and concepts. I brought this talent into the classroom with me. But these non-mainstream ways of philosophizing did not help me in school: they led to my academic struggles. During my years of middle school and high school I became a bad writer, in the minds of my teachers. In my mind too, I slowly began to think of myself as a non-writer. The bright ink marks were beginning to take a toll on my literacy health.

I stopped caring about my success as a student and I stopped reading my teachers’ comments. When a teacher would hand back a paper, I would quickly look at my grade and then stuff the paper into my backpack. Although I began to loathe writing academic papers for my teachers, I never gave up writing. To compensate for my frustrations in school, I began writing privately. I adopted a private world where I could express myself. Writing became a refuge. It was a place no one could enter. My teachers could not comment on my ungrammatical sentences or my missing thesis statements. While alone, I lost my audience and wrote freely.

Once my life context changed and I became interested in the hereafter instead of the here-and-now, reading and writing for school purposes became unimportant, and acquisition of these skills became unworthy of my effort. I lacked the interest to continue being literate in the traditional sense. At Amphitheater High School, I did not want to conform to the educational system and the constraints it placed on me. Teachers assigned topics I cared little about. The essay questions they assigned were based on the experiences of the average teenager. My English teachers presupposed that all of us were alike. We were all having the same life experiences. In paper after paper, I failed to address the essay questions: I went into rants of my own. The teachers clearly did not understand, nor did they try to understand, the issues I was writing about.

Despite all of my struggles, I ended up graduating from high school when I was only sixteen. No one at my high school had ever graduated so quickly. Even though most of my teachers had little hope for my educational success, I defied the odds of the system. I can only attribute this to my relentless determination. Throughout the years, the little voice that I see personified in red-ink blots still sits on my shoulder and whispers, “You are not a writer. Stop writing. You are a failure.” But I continue to write, just as I did then.

The problems I encountered with education happened because I knew how to “read and write the world" to use Paulo Friere's phrase (qtd. in Smith 273), but the school system did not accept this as a form of literacy. They only needed me to “read and write the word” (Friere, qtd. in Smith 273), which I was not adept at doing. Because the world I was experiencing was not “respected as legitimate and accurate," I had little support during my most formative teenage years. The world I was experiencing was foreign to my teachers and therefore I got lost in the system. My experience is an example of how educational systems fail to include atypical students into primary and secondary discourses. Had my teachers tried to understand me, today I would be a more confident and possibly more competent writer.

                                                                        I am here
                                      Literate and able to understand scholarly texts
                                          For you who have not had this opportunity
                                            I read for you so I may speak out for you

Source

Smith, David M. “The Anthropology of Literacy Acquisition.” The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives. Ed. B. Schieffelin and P. Gilmore New York: Ablex, 1986. 261 - 275.