Reading, Writing, Education- the Things I Take for Granted

Until I read the literacy narratives assigned for this week, I did not realize how much I don't appreciate the fact that I get a good education. I never even think about how lucky I am, compared to others around the world, and others who lived before me. While reading the "Generating Ideas and Text" area, I also realized just how hard it is to start a narrative piece.
When I read the title to Frederick Douglas's Learning To Read, I thought to myself, "Great... another annoying story about how someone first learned to read when they were little", but it was much different. I liked that this story wasn't your typical "how I learned to read" story. It was about the struggles one had to go through to teach himself to read and write, even as an adult. This was all because he was an African American living in the US before the Civil War. The Malcolm X story, Literacy Behind Bars, also showed me the hardships some had to go through simply to get the things that are just handed to me today.
Of all of the methods for generating ideas, my favorite is the one we exercised in class last week, freewriting. During these 5-10 minutes of nothing but writing, I find myself able to throw all of my ideas on paper, even if they are unorganized. I think this is helpful because if one starts out trying to put organized ideas down, they are likely to forget an important aspect they may have thought to include before but didn't get into an organized idea. In freewriting, I can blabber about any idea I like and write about any aspect of it that comes to mind. This is great for coming up with supporting details for each idea later on. I will definitely bookmark this page for use these next couple weeks when writing my Narrative.