Brett Phillips 9/27/15
Hum 11 Mrs. Rossi

Struggling to act her own age during an embarrassing birthday, Cisneros shadows her emotions when in front others. Traveling back in time, eleven year old Cisneros explains her embarrassment during a specific moment of her life. Rachel attempts to have a stiff upper lip her teacher, Mrs. Price, humiliates her. But the powerful first person point of view conveys Rachel’s despair. This flashback of Cisneros’s childhood is produced as if it was happening to her the day you read it. For example, Cisneros states that “only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box”. This sentence shows that Cisneros was truly living in the past while writing this personal memoir. This proved to be an influential factor in the telling of this story, and makes the reader feel has if they were there while this incident occurred. The first person point of view in this memoir also lets the reader understand and interpret Cisneros thoughts and feelings when her teacher belittled her in front of her whole class. Her anxiety stormed feelings are shown when she almost had a nervous breakdown in class. She describes her feelings stating that “I’m feeling sick inside, like a part of me that’s three wants to come out of my eyes, only I squeeze them shut tight and bite down on my teeth”. Telling her most memorable childhood moment in the first person point of view transformed Cisneros’s story and brought the reader inside the brain of an eleven year old – who sometimes feels three, or five, or seven.