Experience #3 Visual literacy -Sweetheart Elections

Visual literacy can be practiced in a lot of different ways and often takes a lot of different forms. A good example of a moment where I practiced visual literacy was while I was running for a sweetheart position for one of the fraternities on campus. Being a sweetheart for a fraternity is another one of the things that I did to get involved on campus/in the greek community; essentially being a fraternity sweetheart means that you are one of the 'bros' or a honorary member to their chapter and it is something that only one woman in the community can get elected for each year for each chapter. Some of the things that go into the election process for becoming one include, learning the history of your fraternity, learning about all of the members in the chapter, showing supreme skills in certain games (Yes I mean beer pong + others and yes I'm great at them), and lastly you usually have to have a talent of somesort. I have seem people going through elections do everything from dancing/singing to making rosas ranch from scratch to show off during the talent portion of elections. What I did as a part of my talent portion was cringy to say the least... I wrote a poem about a part of their history. The poem has since been destroyed but it taught me a lot about visual literacy and I think it could be a useful story (obviously as a PG version) to keep in mind when teaching my own students in the future. I think I speak for almost everyone when I say that poetry is the WORST. Poetry is hard to write, often hard to understand, and has no real meaning as to what is being told, therefore making it one of the easiest and hardest subjects all in one. Because I wanted to stand out from my opponents and was at the time taking an 'Intro to Poetry' class I thought what better than to make a poem about the flower that is the symbol for the fraternity I was trying to get elected into. I remember sitting down and reading several poems about flowers, specifically roses and thought to myself that it couldn't be the hardest thing to do... all I had to do was describe a rose in a beautiful way using words...right...easy. In the end it wasn't the most beautiful or well written poem but it tested my skills as a writer and helped me step outside of my comfort zone. I think that as a teacher I could use this experience to show my students that poetry can be uncomfortable but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used to express/ practice visual literacy. Because of this experience I was challenged enough to not only produce some poetry but also win the election because I did something that was out of the ordinary. I also gained a better understanding of the formatting and vocabulary of poetry from the poetry class that I was in at the time so overall this experience really will help me in my future classroom.