Rules of Literacy in Communities

I am a part of many communities including my family, my dorm floor, and college. Each community has its own set of rules for literacy. Learning these literacy rules is vital to being an important part of the community and understanding what is happening in the community. Throughout my life, I have been around pools as a competitive swimmer. I was a competitive swimmer for about nine to ten years. I was on my high school’s varsity swim team for four years and I was the captain my senior year. I consider myself quite literate when it comes to competitive swimming.

Swimming can be deceiving. Most people know how to swim in general such as just having fun at a pool. There is a whole other level with competitive swimming. Becoming literate in swimming begins with learning the four strokes: freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. Learning these four strokes is a rite of passage as a young swimmer. The next part of becoming literate in competitive swimming is learning how to do the freestyle and backstroke flip turns and learning the different types of dives. The different dives include racing dives, conventional dives, and relay dives.

Another part of becoming literate at competitive swimming is having swim meet experience. Swim meets can be very long, chaotic, and confusing because hundreds of swimmers may be competing at times. Swimmers must know what to do or they risk missing their race. There are different systems that are used at meets to organize the swimmers and shorten the amount of time of the meet. At some meets, you simply go to the diving blocks when you hear your event called, while at others you receive different cards for each of your events that you give to the timers in your lane. Swimmers must also be familiar with the different swimming events. The events have a range of distances with each of the strokes. The individual medley or “i.m.” has all four strokes in the order of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle and one person swims this. On the other hand, the medley relay has each swimmer swim one stroke and it is in the order of backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and freestyle.

Equipment and practice are also important for swimmers to be familiar with. There are many different types of suits that the swimmer uses in different situations. At practice, they may use drag suits, jammers, and Speedos, while at meets they may use leg skins and full body skins. Swimmers must also know how to use goggles, caps, fins for the feet and hands, pull buoys, and kickboards. Swimmers should also be familiar with sprint practices and distance practices and the different swim drills.