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Kayla Karr
Professor Rebecca Agosta
UWRT 1101-029
1 October 2015
Time Travel Through My Literacy Life
When I was in fourth grade I was given the opportunity to compete in the school-wide
spelling that only the fourth and fifth graders participated in. My mom and I would practice the
list of words I was provided every night before I went to bed. She would call out a word and I
would spell it. From the living room you would hear her say, Spell neighbor. Followed by
my responses, Neighbor. N-e-i-g-h-b-o-r. Neighbor. For three weeks practicing spelling all of
these words correctly was all I could think about. The day of the spelling bee came quicker than I
had anticipated. I was up on stage with twelve other fourth and fifth grade students, clammy
hands and butterflies in our stomachs. The other students began to wither away as they
misspelled words, and by the end it came down to me and one of the fifth graders. We went back
and forth for a few rounds before I received a word I wasnt too familiar with. The word was
pumpernickel, yet the woman calling out the words pronounced it puppernickel. I spelled the
word exactly the way the woman said it. Of course, I missed it and the fifth grader spelled the
word correctly, winning the Belmont Central Elementary School Spelling Bee of 2007. This
incident shows that a lot of people do not pronounce words in the way that they are intended to
be. If the woman would have pronounced the m in pumpernickel, I would have been able to
sound the word out and gotten it right. To this day I am upset with the fact that because of this
woman not knowing how to say pumpernickel correctly I got first runner up in a competition that
I easily should have won. What good came out of all of this is that all of the time I spent

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practicing those words definitely increased my literacy because I learned how to accurately spell
a lot of words, as well as increase my vocabulary. If I was learning to spell a word I had never
heard of before, I would look up its definition, broadening my knowledge of words.
Participating in spelling bees is a tradition that most elementary and middle schools have. I
continued to compete in the spelling bee through eighth grade. The spelling bee in both
elementary and middle school had everyone watching it, with elementary students piled in the
gym to watch and middle school students watching it broadcasted on the television. Seeing that
spelling bees are important to the American culture, it shows that it is crucial to have the
knowledge of the English language and knowing how to spell those words. Because spelling
bees are particularly done by Britain and America, it makes this practice specific primarily to the
English speaking community. Every job in America requires some type of ability to spell and
read, but a lot of jobs want intelligent workers, so learning how to spell words through spelling
bees as well as spelling tests in the younger grades will increase our chances of achieving great
things in life. My participation in spelling bees, increasing my knowledge of the English
language, has brought me to this point in my life of being a student at a university.
Being a part of the spelling bees at my school broadened my vocabulary, but playing
volleyball allowed me to use that vocabulary on the court. Though I began playing volleyball in
fifth grade, I did not become fluent in the knowledge of the sport until tenth grade when my team
got a new coach, Coach Dimmitt. During the summer before the season started I took private
lessons from her to increase my abilities to where she expected them to be if I wanted to be on
varsity. Having the access of money to pay for these lessons and the opportunity to take them
was an advantage in my volleyball career. Although I had been playing the sport for four years,
we started from scratch in learning the proper way she wanted me to serve, to hit, to do

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everything. At first I thought it was stupid, having to re-learn the correct hitting form, but once I
got to the level where I was actually hitting, I saw an immediate difference. I was able to have
much more control and could hit the ball even harder without it going out of bounds often like I
had in my freshman season. I felt like a whole new player. Because of all this extra practice and
better understanding of the game of volleyball, I was rewarded with getting to start in all of the
games the rest of my high school career.
To go along with the high expectations I and other people had for me, I was presented
with an entirely new challenge my senior year of volleyball. My coach was moving me to the
setters position. Sure, I was able to set the ball, but I did not know how much work it was going
to be in having to be the so called quarterback of volleyball on the court. Being a setter you
have to be the loudest player on the court because you have to tell the passers where you are so
they will pass it to you and tell the hitters who you are setting the ball to. You also have to be the
smartest player on the team. Who should I set it to? Who is the most able to get a point off of this
set? If we are down a few points, should I just dump the ball over and get the point myself or
should I trust that the hitters can do it? Setting requires a lot of knowledge and communication in
volleyball. When I first began to play volleyball I was pretty quiet and did not do much talking
on the court. Volleyball demands communication - if you do not communicate you cannot
succeed. I quickly learned that when Coach Dimmitt arrived. I consider her to be the most
important sponsor in my volleyball career, and a sponsor in my regular life, too. She is the
toughest coach Ive ever known, pushing me to my limits because her expectations of me were
through the roof. She named me captain of the team my senior year, leaving me to lead the team
not only on the court but off the court. We werent just your normal volleyball team that went to
practice and played in games. We all had responsibilities we had to uphold and rules that were to

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be followed. If those responsibilities and rules were not executed, the seniors would be the ones
to blame. I learned from her that I had to be a leader and make sure everyone was doing what
they were supposed to, increasing my vocational skills from being a shy and quiet girl to being
able to lead an entire group of varsity and junior varsity girls. This new found confidence Coach
Dimmitt brought out in me has and will continue to allow me to succeed in social contexts as
well as being a leader in school while working in groups in class.
In my sophomore year of high school, my AP Prep English we had to write an essay with
the prompt, Why is my voice important? This essay involved several drafts, with our final draft
having to be presented in front of the class. Writing this essay was one of the hardest essays I
have ever done. Wondering why my voice is important and having to explain it in a six page
essay was not easy at all. Being graded on a presentation was also very difficult because she
expected us to basically memorize our essays and recite them. Did I mention this was hard?
During each draft we had peer editing, just like what we have practiced in my UWRT 1101 class.
In this class we read an essay called Responding-Really Responding-to Other Students
Writing by Richard Straub. In this essay he basically said what it is that us as responders should
do when giving feedback to our fellow classmates essays. In my tenth grade class, my peers
would do exactly what Straub didnt want us to do - they just wrote a couple things that were
very vague. They never went into depth about what I needed to fix. I ultimately had to peer edit
my own paper to make my essay better. It seems that in our culture today we are scared of what
others think about what we say so we dont say everything we need to. So when I had access to
my peers to be able to give me feedback, they either didnt wanna be mean or didnt want to put
any effort into it. It was most likely the latter that held them back from giving me good
responses. Feeling aggravated, I rose to the occasion and picked out what parts I needed to

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change in my essay in order to receive a good grade on the assignment. After all of the changes I
made to my essay throughout my drafting process, I realized that my voice really is important.
What I say and write is always going to matter to someone, affecting them in some way. My
teacher, Mrs. Hord, serves as a sponsor here in making me recognize that my voice is essential.
What I have learned in my literacy journey, through the all the different school events, increasing
my knowledge of volleyball, and just speaking to other people, is that everything I have done up
to this point has shaped who I am as a reader, writer, and communicator today.