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Darius Gallman
Ms. Grant
UWRT
September 9, 2014

The first experience that I had with reading and words in general wasnt from a book, in
some movie, or from the television. As far as I can remember, I learned to read, or at least
learned the phonetics of words, through a video game. Somewhere between the ages of two and
three my parents got me a Game Boy Color, and with that Game Boy came a Pokmon Silver
cartridge. I may not have known what the words meant, but I could pronounce most of them and
identify them when they appeared somewhere else in the game. It isnt entirely fair to say that I
taught myself to read completely through this video game. I remember irritating the life out of
my parents trying to figure out how to say words that would come up often. Thankfully they
were compliant and usually helped me pronounce the words, except for the word route. My
mother and father said, and still say, route in two different ways. My father would say it like r-
OUT while my mother would pronounce it like root. That led to my mangled pronunciation of
the word for a few years. I would combine both of their pronunciations into roe-oot, and be
confused when I was told this was incorrect. I loved that game, beat it through and through, and
the game taught me to finish what I start. I guess it was also a lesson in completion and work
ethic. I am using work ethic because, although it was a video game, remembering what attacks
are super effective against which monsters, what can resist or nullify who, how much damage
would this attack do if this happened was difficult to keep up with as a two or three year old
child. There were 17 different types, and each of those types interacted with each other in
different ways, certain types were less effective against other types while other types would
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completely destroys another. The difficult part was not remembering who could kill who the
fastest (although that was challenging at my age) but un-applying real life logic from game logic.
For instance, there are two types in particular in which the effectiveness of the type does not
make sense in the real world, therefore I would constantly forget and get slaughtered. These
types are electric and grass. Most electric attacks would include a powerful looking animation,
most of which included a large, menacing bolt of lightning dropping from the sky and onto the
target. For some ungodly reason, grass resisted electricity. I asked my dad to explain why, and he
said that it made no sense to him either. For the life of me, I could not understand why what was
effectively a blade of grass could resist lightning, one of the most dangerous and powerful forces
of nature on the face of the planet. This taught me to be literate in video game logic, which to be
brief, is to just throw real world logic off of the highest cliff you can find and just go with what
the game tells you. This literacy, while not completely applicable to life, helped me to be better
at other video games. I no longer questioned why the bottoms of Marios feet were so deadly or
how a character could jump a second time in midair. This could be viewed as me losing my
sense of inquiry but it probably saved me from an injury that would have been caused by trying
to emulate something within a video game.
My first time being formally taught to read was in the fifth level of kindergarten. I was in
a private school in South Carolina named V.V. Reid. We were reading packets that were just
simple sentences typed on a piece of paper and the test was to read these sentences to our
teacher. In order to pass the reading test, you had to read through the 2 pages to the teacher
nonstop, not including the punctuation marks throughout the page. This went on for about a
month where we would come in, get a packet, and try to read it on our own before going to get
tested on it. As I was preparing to write this paper, it dawned on me that while I found reading
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the video game dialogue trivial, reading from the paper was more difficult. This could be for
quite a few reasons. One reason is that a game has a limited number of phrases and maybe I was
correlating the words with what was happening on the screen. It is possible that I didnt
understand a word I was reading and I was just lucky while playing the game. Another reason is
that I may have found reading from a piece of paper was dull and boring. I was literate in video
games because I wanted to be good at them and, at the time, I did not really care about reading
things off of a sheet of paper. Somewhere in my mind I had convinced myself that if the words
didnt have some sort of picture or graphic to go along with it, I lost interest in it. I was literate
only in subjects that I found interesting, which in hindsight, is a good thing. That is how I picked
my major and chose my planned career path and is hopefully how many people think in terms of
what they want to do with their life. The law of work seems unfair, but nothing can change it;
the more enjoyment you get out of your work, the more money you will make. (Twain) Mark
Twain said that and I firmly believe that if you love what you do for a living, you will excel and
exceed at it. I am taking Computer Science courses to become literate in programming or, more
specifically, become literate in learning. New coding languages will come into existence at some
point and they will be able to do more complex processes than the current ones. So memorization
of the current code, while helpful, is pointless. You would have to be literate in learning, by
which I mean, becoming so comfortable with your ability to learn and your individual learning
process that learning becomes easy.
The most current subject that I have become literate in is the construction of computers.
Over the summer of 2013, I had to do and internship for my magnet program in high school. For
my internship I learned how to build computers and make them run. I learned every part that is
necessary for a computer to function and how to install the software to make it function. My
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work day was somewhere between 8 and 10 hours of sitting in a large, cold room and
constructing computers. Within a few days I had learned most major parts of a computer but
could not put them together. Building a computer is about a 30 minute process that becomes
second nature once you get it down. There are actually only a few things you have to be careful
not to screw up the first time, anything else can be tinkered with and altered until you get it
working. The most important thing is to make sure you do not, under any circumstances, touch
the bottom of the CPU. The pins on the bottom of it are easily bent and if just one pin is bent, the
whole computer may not start. Next is the fan that goes on top of the CPU, for which you just
press pins into holes and plug it into a socket on the motherboard that says FAN1. The last thing
you do before installing the motherboard is to put RAM into the long sockets. After that you
install the motherboard into the case. After this, you really cant really ruin the computer unless
you drop something. I learned all this from the employees that worked there. My supervisors
name was Aresh, and he taught me just about everything about building computers and getting
them up and working. Without him I definitely would have been doing some menial task like
sorting mail or sweeping floors. Thanks to him, I built 50+ computers not including my own, and
learned the in and outs of a machine. I am now the third person somebody in my family will call
if something goes horribly wrong with their computers or other devices. First is my father, who
got me into this field in the first place. The second is my uncle, who my father also got into this
field of work.
I became literate mainly in two different subjects. The first, a requirement to function in
this society, reading and speaking in English was done through the medium of video games and
formal education. The second, something that interested me a great deal, the construction and
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installation of computers and computer software was done in the attempt to prepare myself for
my planned future occupation.