Literacy has a different meaning for everyone. Google defines it as “the ability to read and write.” To me, it is much bigger than that and does not only relate to “the ability to read and write.” To me, it means to be fluent (or even learning to be fluent) in something you are passionate about. Becoming fluent in your passions is not a journey, as most people like to explain it. It’s an adventure. It does not have an end or a stopping point. There is always a way to keep moving towards fluency. Like with the weather and its radar, it is always moving, forming, and dissipating in a continuous cycle. The weather never stops. Just as the wind never stops blowing, opportunities to grow through literacy don’t disappear when you think you are at that fluent level. Most of the time, there will be factors around you so that you can grow your literacy knowledge.
One of the things I am passionate about is the weather, and I am learning to become fluent in reading, creating, and analyzing multiple types of weather maps such as isotherm maps, maps with different types of air mass fronts, wind speeds, the jet stream, and even radar. Although I have been in love with the weather for as long as I can remember, my skills relating to weather maps have only started developing within these last couple of years. The way you read a map heavily depends on what type of weather map you are looking at. For example, with an isotherm map, you are given an area that is separated by lines and colors. Each color represents a difference in temperatures. The point of an isotherm map is to connect the places with similar temperatures and show the variation in the areas that have different temperatures. On the other hand, a weather radar shows which direction weather is moving and how much precipitation rain, snow, or thunderstorms may bring. Usually, a weather radar is pretty easy to read as you press a motion button, and it shows you which way a weather system is moving. On the map itself, darker colors mean heavy precipitation, while lighter colors mean the opposite. Most maps will have a key so that the viewer can tell the difference between the types of precipitation. Some radars, like the Weather Channel, will even show the lightning strikes within a certain radius! Since I am doing a weather forecasting concentration, I will always need to be working towards fluency in creating and analyzing these types of weather maps. Becoming literate in these topics has been quickly becoming one of my favorite things to learn. It might be a challenging adventure to become completely fluent, but it will be worth it in the long run because I will be getting the chance to help people by letting them know what the weather will be like so they can prepare accordingly.
One of my favorite literacy adventures that I am also currently on is the one regarding reading and writing. Although I may never be close to fluent, my literacy story starts when I first fell in love with reading while my third-grade teacher, Ms. Wiggins, introduced me to reading for pleasure. One of our homework assignments throughout the year was known as a reading log. Much like logging weather over a period of time for climate analysis purposes, we were to read for a given amount of time for a certain amount of days per week and write a summary about what we read. I always enjoyed this assignment, and I never really thought of it as homework or as anything too tedious, like I thought my math homework was. I also liked writing the reading comprehension summaries for the reading log, but I did not start seriously writing anything until later in my life. These reading logs are what introduced me to book series such as The Magic Treehouse, Judy B. Jones, and other popular Scholastic bookfair books.
This is also around the same time I started falling in love with the weather (even though I was afraid of thunderstorms growing up) and other natural disasters. My passion for natural geological and atmospherical events came from not only the Discovery channel’s “Storm Chasers” show but also from books such as “I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005”, “I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906”, “I Survived the Joplin Tornado, 2011”, and more! Ever since I read the Lauren Tarshis books, I have been fascinated by such events and am now glad that I am finally in a school where I can study these things and make them my career. I hope that one day I will have the opportunity to mix my two passions and write a book related to popular weather events and their effects, whether that be on a fictional character or somone in real-time.
From the time I was born to my sophomore year in high school, I lived with my grandparents half of the time, so I grew very close with them. Before my grandma retired, she was an English teacher as well as a substitute teacher. Growing up, my relationship with her influenced my literacy journey as she was constantly pushing my brother and I to read, whether that be the National Geographic magazines that we regularly received or an actual book. Like the “I Survived” books, the National Geographic magazines also had an influence on my opinion of weather, geology, and even astronomy. In my free time, I loved to read the issues: “Mount Saint Helens: New Life in the Blastzone” (May 2010), “Water: Our Thirsty World” (April 2010), “What’s Up with the Weather?” (September 2012), “Solar Super Storms” (June 2012), and many more! Even if I wasn’t truly reading them, I loved to flip through the many pictures the magazines included. Another early influence I had in my life came from my grandmother, father, and mother, who I always saw pick up a book, so in addition to having to read for school assignments, I may have started to mirror my family and their reading habits. Once I started getting into reading in my free time, my grandmother was always taking us to our local library for my brother and I to browse and pick a couple of books, and it quickly became one of my favorite places to go. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library had summer reading events during the summers, which were essentially just like the third-grade reading log but online. A difference between the summer reading and the school assignments was that you unlocked a new “prize” of sorts for every couple of books you read, one of which was a free Wendy’s frosty coupon.
Between the third-grade reading logs, summer reading events, and the app I currently use now at nineteen called Goodreads, I have a habit of recording what I read, similar to what meteorologists do with weather data such as temperature, humidity, and windspeeds. Just as the wind shifts based on its environment, my interests in reading shifted as I grew older. I would do through periods where it’s either very windy, and I read a lot, or there would be minimal wind, and I hadn’t touched a book in a long time. The types of genres I read also changed, like the weather, as I grew older. Like the changing seasons, many readers have a shift in the kinds of books they like to read. When I was younger, my favorite genres were mystery novels and the “Choose your own Adventure” books, which I thought were similar to video games. Now, I mostly read either fantasy or contemporary romance novels, but part of me would like to branch back out and start reading mystery novels again. I wish I still had access to the readings logs I had as a child so that I could compare them to the reading records I now keep on Goodreads. Comparing and analyzing is another weather-related factor I am also working to become fluent in, as comparing the current and past data is very important when looking at specific trends such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
Many say that quarantine was not a good time for them, but I found that it was quite the opposite for me. During this time, I was able to get closer to my family and my group of closest friends. The wind also began to pick up again as I fell back into love with reading. Although an expensive hobby, I have found that spending my time immersed in worlds that are not my own is one of my favorite things to do with my free time. Last year, from May to December, I read about forty-five books, one of my favorites being the “Six of Crows” series by Leigh Bardugo, but the book that got me back into the practice of reading again was “The Cruel Prince” by Holly Black. This year, I am almost done with my thirty-fourth book, “Kingdom of the Wicked” by Kerri Maniscalco, hoping to finish at least fifty by the end of this year. I was able to keep track of this with the Goodreads app, which not only allows you to keep track of the number of books you’ve read but also allows you to create lists with the books you want to read and are currently reading. Not only is reading a way for me to escape, but it also helps to fuel any writing or short story ideas that I have and is an excellent way to take a quick break from school work and read a chapter or two.
I have known I loved to write since eighth grade, when I started creating my own stories and plotlines. That love grew during my later high school years when I took a creating writing class. In this class, I got the opportunity to learn and improve my writing skills in fictional writing, poetry, short stories, screenwriting, and more. My favorite sections of the class were screenwriting and short stories, as these reflect the type of books I like to read. It was an online class, but my teacher would meet with us in person every once in a while and was very supportive of the pieces I’ve written. I have started many of what I would like to be novels in the past, but I have unfortunately never finished one. My downfall is that when it comes to creative writing, I get anxious to let others read and critique the stories that I have written for fun, but this is something that I hope to overcome in the future. Even though I am an Atmospheric Science major, I hope to be able to publish a novel of some sort, whether it is fantasy, a mystery, or something else. As I mentioned before, because of my career path, I hope to one day write a book intertwining both my passion for weather and my love for reading and writing like the “I Survived” books do. The same hope can also be applied to nonfiction writing pieces in magazines such as National Geographic and Discover.
​Most people talk about journeys having a start point and an endpoint. I don’t necessarily agree with this when it comes to reading and writing because there is no “end date,” which is why I prefer the term adventure. Much like a weather radar loop, literacy adventures have no “end date.” A weather radar loop is a continuous cycle of incoming types of precipitation such as rain and snow. Improving your literacy can be thought of in the same way just with reading and writing instead of rain and snow. There is always a way to improve your writing skills through editing and new writing styles. The same thing can apply to reading as there are so many new books published daily, there is always a way to broaden the type of literacy you consume. The weather has no stopping point, so why should you?