Response to "Learning to Read"

In the excerpt “Learning to Read” from Malcolm X’s autobiography he talks about how he first got onto his particular path towards learning. In his story he starts out by saying he was the “most articulate hustler out there” but still felt lacking in his writing skills. He goes on to talk about how he educated himself to the level of eloquence that he was better known for later in life. It started with his incarceration where a man called Bimbi was able to inadvertently point out Malcom’s own level of ignorance. This caused him to try to become as learned as he was but all of the books he picked up “might as well have been written in Chinese” again illustrating his lack of knowledge. Malcolm then started at the beginning, one of the most basic levels of learning a language you can get, he read the dictionary. This would allow him to greatly expand on his vocabulary and comprehend larger concepts.

Something about this that struck me was he did what many of us do many times we try to learn something, I know I can be guilty of this, he tried to start where he thought he should be and wound in over his head. Rather than take the common road of defeat though, giving up on the learning experience, he did something that many won’t do but is foundational to most educational experiences. By picking up the dictionary he wasn't trying to teach himself sentence structure, proper punctuation, or even how for format a paragraph, he was starting with the most basic blocks of all of the rest of it was dependent on, the words themselves.

I know myself when I try to learn something I want to jump straight into the level of what I am trying to emulate, and while trying to do it this way can occasionally produce functional results I feel that there is always a certain something you miss by doing it this way. Ever since I got my Android phone I have wanted to write some personal use type applications for it. Android uses Java for the coding language, but most times I would pick up a how to write Java type book one of the common early statements was “you should have some basic understanding of C or some other object oriented language, you can get by without it but you would benefit greatly but having this background.” As a result I have given up on jumping right into Java programming have instead I bought myself a C++ book instead.