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By 3rd grade, my reading began to take off. As I understand, this age is typically the time students begin to "read to learn," rather than "learn to read." Within the first month of the school year, I picked up the Harry Potter book series. I quickly fell in love with the series. I kept my before-bed reading routine, but now I began to read all throughout the day as well (during classes, at home after school, car rides, etc.). By 4th grade, I remember my class held a Read-A-Thon. If you read a certain amount of pages, you could earn a bronze, silver, or gold medal. This was the first time I remember being extrinsically motivated to read. Up to this point, reading had always been an inherently joyous and natural activity to do. I bought into the Read-A-Thon, and scored quite well. Looking back, I believe this event contribute towards a shift in my Primary Discourse, in which I viewed and expressed myself no longer as first-and-foremost a reader, but rather as a competitor (Gee, 2015).

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The earliest memories of literacy I have are reading picture books with my mother before bed. Naturally, my mother would scaffold the reading; she would read one page and I would read the other. By first grade, we started reading chapter books, namely the Magic Treehouse book series. During my developmental psychology courses as an undergraduate student here at UC Davis, we studied the tremendous benefits this routine has not only for a young child's literacy development, but for their perspective on reading as well.

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My early elementary school years were also shaped by the shows my siblings and I watched. Our household was a strong PBS household -- namely with shows like SuperWhy and WordWorld, and later on with Arthur and The Electric Company. I have rewatched some of these shows for academic purposes during education courses as an undergraduate, and it is quite clear how these shows strongly scaffold foundational reading and writing skills for young children.

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To sufficiently contextualize my Critical Literacy Autobiography, I find it important to emphasize a few key aspects of my upbringing. For starters, I grew up in a relatively well-off, white suburban environment. My father worked a single job, while my mother stayed home and took care of my siblings and me. Both of my parents had the means to give attention to my academic and literacy development throughout my childhood. Given the fact I grew up speaking English and German, I never struggled with english development either. As I listened to the biographies of my peers, I more deeply realized although our experiences may differ greatly, there are many aspects consistent throughout as well. Although I view literacy as multi-modal, I chose to focus on literacy in its more traditional form -- surrounding reading literature and english classes.

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For a stretch of years, I could not fathom picking up a book on my own time. I understood reading to be for academic purposes, simply a grade in a gradebook. I maintained this perspective until my first history courses in my junior year of college. During these courses, I learned true, accurate history that I was kept from learning through my entire K-12 educational experience. This process was a deeply impactful and radicalizing process, and it left me wanting to learn more. During the summer before my senior year, I did something I had not done for years: I picked up a book to read for leisure and joy. Over this process, I unknowingly but naturally developed a critical aspect to my literacy development, no longer passively accepting what I was reading as fact, but rather "looking at [a text] in different ways, analyzing it, and suggesting possibilities for change and improvement" (Vasques, 2019). Unlike anytime before, I found profound meaning in reading, for the simple reason that it gave me a framework to which I could understand the world and my place in it. And if this was my one avenue to understand the world, it simply made sense to be critical of what I was reading and the perspective to which I brought to it.

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Throughout high school english education, my love for reading not only dissipated, but gradually developed into an active contempt of it. I attribute this transformation to multiple factors. For starters, the simple act of choosing which books I wanted to read was more or less abruptly taken away. Rather than choosing a book, and introspectively seeing how I may relate to it, we were assigned readings, which were to be read on an assigned schedule, along with the assigned guided reading questions that went along with the book. Quite naturally, reading was no longer a creative, introspective activity, but rather more akin to a job done for a grade. Such an environment, one with a reliance on extrinsic forms of motivation to facilitate reading, once again naturally shaped my Primary and Secondary Discourses away from any aspect of reading or being a literary-minded person (Gee, 2015). Instead, I gravitated towards sports or math.

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In the summer between my 5th and 6th grade years, my family moved from San Diego, CA to Annapolis, MD. For most of that summer, I was without friends and without any extracurricular activities. My family and I spent much of our free time in the local public library. I remember picking up a summer reading suggestion list that the library had. I would read one book at a time from the list, most times reading multiple books a week. Looking back, that is likely the most reading I did in a given stretch of time, at least up until my senior year of college. I remember really enjoying most of the books from the suggestion list. Not only was reading a joyous activity to do in my free time, but it really took my mind off of the isolating and tough situation I was in.