34 Jesse Thomas – My Literacy Journey

Jesse Thomas (He/Him) is a Sophomore from Waynetown, IN  majoring in Business Management.  Jesse went back to school in the spring of 2024, after being out of school for 26 years. This Literacy Narrative project was prepared for Sara Baxter’s ENGW131 (27010), who states, “I was especially impressed with the meaningful connections Jesse made in his literacy narrative between his life experiences and his growth as a speaker, reader, and writer.”

My Literacy Journey

Growing up on a farm laid the groundwork for my work ethic and communication style. These skills have been instrumental in every phase of my life, whether consciously utilized or not. In Dylan Littles essay “Constructing the House of Life”, he states that “Our environment is what molds us into what we will one day become” (As cited in Wardle & Downs, 2017, p L10). This resonates deeply with me, especially considering how my journey with literacy began and evolved over time.

When it comes to communication, we always had a unique way of communication among my family members. My siblings and I would always talk a really broken up English to each other. I typically remained quiet, tucked away in background where I could silently observe those around me. As we got older, we talked in a very slang language that only my siblings and I could utterly understand.

Mom would always push us to get good grades in school but as we got into middle and high school, she struggled because she had dropped out of school in the eighth grade. I had to learn how to ask her for help based off what she was capable of navigating through due to her lack of schooling. Dad grew up on a farm all his life. He worked in the fields with his dad, and he dropped out of school when he was in the sixth grade. He would help to maintain the fields and help to raise the livestock. He started working for a factory in 1980 as a maintenance tech. Even without a strong education, dad learned to read schematics, blueprints, and drawings. He used his mechanical abilities to start a career and adapted to what he knew. As I grew older, I would learn from him how to work on cars, house projects and everyday odd and end tasks. Dad was always working to provide for the family. There would be weeks when we would not see him because he worked nights, and we would be at school when he was home. When it came to math, he made up for the lack of formal schooling by teaching us what he had learned over the years in everyday work he did. As I grew up watching dad work, quickly learned that dad was someone I wanted to emulate. What he was not provided with formal schooling he made up for by getting out into the workforce at an early age.

At the age of fourteen, I started working at fast food restaurants to gain skills and earn money just as dad did. I was not able to work a lot of hours at that time but was able to start earning some money. This started my desire to make as much money as I could. Over the years, I would work three jobs during the summer and two during the school year.  Just as I was with my siblings at home, I was always the quiet type through school and would rarely ask for help. During middle school, I discovered that if you were not in sports or in an accelerated class, you did not get the help as everyone else. I struggled through my English classes because it was not a class that interested me. I was much more interested in partying and working.

I was not the type to sit and put words down on paper and knew if I did, it would always have so much red ink through it. The more this happened, the worse I got. In elementary school, I got good at spelling and would ace through spelling tests with no problems. My mom made me write out all the words on a weekly basis 5 – 10 times to make sure I understood the spelling. This helped me to get good grades at spelling but also continued to push me away from English work. A study that was conducted by Andrea Lunsford, found that many people reported something painful associated with writing: being made to sit on their left hands so they had to write right-handed “or “being made to write ‘I will not X’ a hundred times in punishment for some mistake” (B13). During middle school and high school, writing “X” was a new form of punishment for us kids due to Mom doing most of the punishment while dad was at work. During high school I became more interested in working than I did in school. I knew I was not going to further my education with college after high school, so I did not put forth much effort. Thus, I began to explore the ways in which schooling could help me prepare for the workforce and develop a plan for making money following high school.

While mom and dad tried their darndest to get us kids to pursue something after high school, I was never interested in pursuing a higher education. Even though school did not interest me, there was a program called ICE (interdisciplinary Cooperative Education) from which I could benefit. I started looking at going into the air force when I was seventeen. While looking at the possibility of the air force, I started utilizing mock interviews while in school to see what other career choices were out there. I ended up backing out of the career choice involving the Air Force and started pursuing other opportunities.

I started to learn about knowing your audience and how to relate to them when I showed up for an interview. I wore dress slacks and a silk shirt and felt uncomfortable. When I got to the interview, the manager was wearing blue jeans and a polo shirt. I felt out of place. I thought to myself “I could have worn my normal clothes and not dressed up.” Part of the interview process was to learn some of the tasks that I would be doing if I got hired. The environment was a very dusty and dirty environment. After the interview, I noticed how dirty my black slacks got and understood why the manager was wearing blue jeans. About two weeks later, I was offered to come in and train to see how much I retained from the first interview. This time I wore my normal blue jeans and T-shirt. I felt more comfortable and relaxed. About a month later I was called and offered the job. This started my career as a lab technician at a steel mill.

The guys I worked with had their own style of language and developed different terminology on tasks that completed daily. I was very reserved on how I talked around them, especially being the new guy but also being eighteen and everyone else being thirty plus. As time progressed, I started picking up their language and feeling more comfortable to talk like them. After being there for about a year, the owner showed up for a visit and I saw a different side of the guys I worked with. They became more professional in how they talked to each other and even on the radios. They started acting more respectful to each other knowing the owner was on-site visiting.

In the first year working for this company, I started dealing with the state DOT during audits on a monthly basis. I found that even when dealing with them, they have a different language and learned that need to deal with them in a totally unique way. After getting to know the auditors on a close basis, our language became different and more of an informal language. We could sit and tell jokes while doing our audits. Once a year we would have higher level auditors come on site and would we go back to a formal language. In 2006, I got a promotion to be a Quality Control Manager and had seven sites I dealt with on a regular basis. I started seeing how each site had their own separate terminology for the same jobs and commodities. I recognized there were a couple distinct factors at play, one just the dialect of the region and how people spoke, the other part had to do with the customer and what they referred to as their product in their particular mill.

In 2009 I took a position as a supervisor in our Mississippi location. I again found that there was another level of language out there. I was able to relate to some of the employees there decently but found others I struggled with. The employees I struggled with had a very southern accent. I would have conversations on the phone and after I would hang up my wife would ask me “How did you even understand what they were saying” their English was very broken and when you coupled that with a very southern accent, some of them were very hard to understand. Working with them daily, I was able to learn how to really pay attention to how they were speaking and what they were saying to understand them. I also would deal with the steel mill customer so I would have to learn how to speak even more of a professional language. I had to learn how to speak to them on a higher level than what I would talk to my employees. As I built a relationship with them, we got more of a slang English. We were able to joke around and learn how to communicate on a regular basis without having to be proper.

In 2012 I went back to my home site and returned to working as an operator. The language barrier became of sorts due to working with highly educated people for several years and then going back to the blue-collar workforce. The guys I had started with still talked the same, but I was a little more reserved in going back to my roots. However, it did not take long to settle back in and be one of the “boys” again.

In 2016 I was offered a supervisor job in a different area at my home site. There was a learning curve of speaking to the same employees in a different language and tone than I had been for several years. Of course, this came with more troubles at the start due to guys thinking they could talk to me in the same manner they had before, until they finally realized that they could not. Moving into an area manger role, I have found that I am sending out more emails and documents to a higher level of management. In doing this, I have learned that I need to have a more professional approach to the way I speak and communicate. My boss encouraged me to get my degree to better assist and mold me into a more well-rounded manager and to give me the tools to speak and write to upper management in a more professional manner. Working all these years in a middle management group and hourly, I was not concerned as much with the way I was speaking to the guys I worked with every day. I truly never believed that I would ever see the need in going back to school but after starting this semester, I have realized the importance of not only being able to talk and write in a more grammar correct English style, but just being more knowledge able about it and my other subjects can play a big part in furthering my career. One thing I have never understood was that there are different variations to reading and writing, and everyone will have their own way of criticizing it but the more ways that we learn and grow from our environment will help to mold who we are growing up to be.

As a kid growing up on a farm till today, I still struggle with reading and writing. This class will help me to better understand where I need to be and help me to get there. The biggest things that I read over are contracts, KPI’s (key performance indicator), safety plans and upper management emails. I feel I have grown from my high school days till now being able to comprehend what I am reading but still struggle to this day on putting words onto paper and effectively conveying my message in a grammatically correct and professionalism tone.