Mahquella Jones Intro to contemporary literacies

 Mahquella Jones

Professor Rosen

Spring 2021 Contemporary Literacies

24 January 2021

Introduction

Hello my name is Mahquella Jones, I am 19 years old and I am from New Brunswick, New Jersey. I am a sophomore at New Jersey City University, I am majoring in Sociology and I will graduate with my Bachelors Degree in 2023. I would like to get my Masters degree in counseling because I’d like to counsel troubled children. I feel like children always need someone to talk to, if a parent can’t be there for them because they need that support system and I want to be there for the children that I counsel and help them to make the best choices. I also want to counsel children because I feel like I went through regular stuff as a child and teen that normal kids go through but I didn’t want to talk to my parents about it. Children sometimes think they can deal with battles themselves or the problem may go away with time but truthfully they need an open ear that can listen to them and offer helpful feedback sometimes. I am taking this class because it is a tier 2 requirement and I figured I would enjoy what this class has to offer, based on reading the description. 

Literacy has always been evident in my household because my mom is a teacher, so she always took teachings from her classroom and applied it to helping her children. My mom believes that reading and writing is the key to success and she always asks me where I would be if I didn’t know how to read and write. My brother never really took interest in literacy and school in general, so I feel like he pushed me to better my reading and writing skills because he knows how important it is and how much it is needed but he also knows that he was never that great at it so he helped me. I come from an African-American household and I am also a woman so African-American women were never really pushed to go to school and learn things and be out of the house. My grandmom and the women before her in our family were never pushed to go to school to learn to read and write because that was up to the men. Yes my grandmom read and wrote but she chose to do that and a lot of the African-American women around her, in that time period didn’t choose to do that , they chose to stick to the “norms” at the time of being a dedicated stay at home wife and mother. Times have changed drastically since then and when I do graduate college, I know for a fact my grandma will be more than proud of me because i’m doing everything that she always wanted to do but was never able to do.

Literacy was just as evident and practiced in my household as it was in the community. Other than home and School, Sunday school in Church was where I learned a lot of reading and writing skills as well. When I started working, especially in college, that’s when I started working for the advisement center and now I have skills from that job such as emailing students, reading printer manuals or computer manuals to fix them, I learned a lot overall about literacy throughout my years and am always looking forward to learning more.