Literacy in my Communities

Throughout my life I have been a part of many different communities there was my school community, the communities created by the sports teams I was a part of, and my family but I feel one where literacy was extremely important was my work community. Both oral and literacy play a role in my work community.
I work as a lifeguard for a local county club; literacy was involved with this job before I even really acquired it. To become a lifeguard at this country club you are required to take a lifeguard certification class, a CPR/AED class, and a fist aid class. All of these classes involved reading, practical tests and written tests. If I was illiterate there would have been no way I could have passed these classes. Both written literacy and oral literacy were important to getting through the classes. I needed to be able to read through the books and take the tests. More important was oral literacy communication between other individual was crucial in doing the practical part of learning and the tests. The vocabulary used in these classes was also somewhat new to me. I had to learn the difference between types of victims like passive and active and the meaning of the different ways to save these victims. These classes required a general literacy but also took my literacy to another specified level.
My literacy continued to be important once I actually began working. Oral literacy is extremely important in this job. Communication between lifeguards is extremely important. It is needed to do small things like working out the schedule and deciding who going up in the chair when to more important things like who needs to do what during an actual rescue. I we didn’t communicate to each other during recues they could go extremely wrong. Our managers also have to communicate all the saving procedures to us as well as our individual duties throughout the day like cleaning and checking the chlorine levels. While oral literacy is most important written literacy is also present. We have to record the levels of chlorine and pH every hour and also have to write up incidents reports whenever any kind of first aid or rescue is preformed, which is almost every day.
Literacy is really important to all the communities that I am a part of. If I was illiterate there would be many things that I couldn’t be a part of and this job is one of those things. Literacy is absolutely imperative to life. People could get by being illiterate but there are many things that they would miss out on.