...February 2015 Rodriguez Essay Rough Draft “The Achievement of Desire” is a story of a boy that came to the United States from Mexico with his parents who were seeking a better life and more opportunities. As Rodriguez becomes older, he starts to go to school and with this, starts to drift away from his family values and culture. In turn, it starts to create a separation between his education and his family. Many people have to make difficult decisions in order to achieve their desire or dream. For Rodriguez, the idea of fitting in is creating this separation and making his education his priority. Education was the focus of his entire life. He could not feel comfortable at home because he realized there was an educational division between him and his family since he was in elementary school. He was proud that he lost his Spanish accent, and he even corrected the “simple” grammatical mistakes of his parents as a second grade student. (Rodriguez 1) Not only that, he was oddly annoyed when he was unable to get parental help with a homework assignment. When he reached grade three, the separation between him and his family became more obvious. His ever-increasing intensity to his studies became a joke to his families, which Francisco 2 lead to the reason of why he must physically separate himself from his family. His father once found him reading a novel in a closet hiding. His mom even became worried and asked “What do you see in your books?” (Rodriguez 11) In Rodriguez’s...
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...an autobiographical essay, Richard Rodriguez reflects on his life as a young boy as he suffered to balance life in the academic world and the life of a working class family. Through out his essay, he identifies as a “scholarship boy”, someone who pushes his family and friends away all for the sake of “knowledge”, a definition he found in a book he came across called The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. Rodriguez explains that in order for him to achieve success, it was necessary to disconnect himself from the life he knew before education. Even though leaving home and branching out towards new ways of thinking are considered key elements in education, it does not necessarily mean that we have to alienate ourselves in the process to become successful. Rodriguez is present in three different forms in his essay, the child, the graduate student who first comes across The Uses of Literacy, and the adult who has “completed his path” in education. The first section in his essay focuses on his life and the difficulties he faced growing up in a bilingual environment. We notice how he associates academic success with alienation from a very young age; as he mentions in his essay “He takes his first step toward academic success, away from his family” (Rodriguez, pg. 4). Rodriguez also focuses on his parents a lot and elaborates how they helped shape the person he is today, and not strictly in a positive way. In the begging of his essay, Rodriguez mentions how he wasn’t prepared for...
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...author Richard Rodriguez warns that “he has used education to remake himself”, but in doing so isolated himself from his past, and those he cared about. Rodriguez wrote this essay in the context of how we teach (are we just memorizing without understanding ), and that with age he’s able to see the importance and pitfalls of education. He wants to warn his audience those much like his younger self first and second generation immigrants, but also those well educated or in college who are still making the same mistakes he once did. Rodriguez’s purpose is to persuade the audience that education is not a ladder to forever climb, that education is not just memorizing facts, but about bettering ourselves and learning to think critically, or we may end up like a “scholarship boy”...
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...In this essay, Rodriguez reminisces about his education and the impact it has had on his life. He claims that his success in life is based on how education changed him and separated him from the life he had "before becoming a student." Throughout this essay, Rodriguez refers to Richard Hogart's book The Uses of Literacy, in which he discovered one of the few mentions of the "scholarship boy" by educational theorists. Rodriguez sees himself in Hogart's descriptions of the scholarship boy, and this has helped him understand his experiences. Rodriguez expresses concern that he was the type of student who, while making good grades, simply memorized information and never developed his own opinions. Like the "scholarship boy," Rodriguez worked for academic success and denied his past. And also like the "scholarship boy," Rodriguez experienced nostalgia for his past. But he notes that while education created a gulf between him and his parents, education also made it possible to care about that fact and to write about it. Rodriguez remembers his parents' experiences with education and work. His mother received a high school degree even though, he says, her English was poor. She went to night school, worked as a typist, and was very proud of her excellent spelling ability. His father moved to the United States as a young man, seeking a better life as an engineer. That dream never materialized, and his father worked at a series of unsatisfying low end jobs that, nonetheless, kept...
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...The academic career of Richard Rodriguez can be looked at as a very textbook definition of the experiences a student may encounter in their path through the academic system. However, what Rodriguez’s encounters in school cannot be defined as a universal application for all students. Many children begin reading and writing with a similar passion that Rodriguez had, but many students have different experiences that shape their own unique story. Richard Rodriguez did not begin school like any normal student in a predominately English speaking region. Rodriguez grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, so the initial start of school, reading and writing in an unfamiliar language would have been challenging. Once Rodriguez overcame the language barrier, his love for reading began to blossom. At the young ages of either eight or nine...
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...Communication is essential in a community. Through language, individuals are able to share experiences and knowledge. However, conflict arises when one is forced to choose between multiple languages in order to communicate in public. In Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, he argues that bilingual education causes people to lose their identity. He crafts his argument by using anecdote and personification, and anaphora. Richard Rodriguez proves his position against bilingual education by revealing his experiences through anecdote in order to illustrate the detrimental effects of bilingualism. He recalls the feeling of losing one’s identity due to bilingual education by stating, “After listening to me, he looked away...
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...In the essay Rodriguez Richard “The Achievement of Desire”, can be labeled as a dissertation of his past, which Richard Rodriguez makes analyses on the spectrum of his life. In the text Rodriguez refers to himself as the scholarship boy, a male who -“tends to over-stress the importance of examinations, of the piling-up knowledge and revived opinion” [ He gains the skill of learning, of hoarding new facts, but he can’t apply is own opinion when needed]. In other words, the author is searching for pity in the audience by describing his persona as a male who is in dire need of attention and is conflicted with a disease causing him to have an endless thirst for knowledge. His ideology for making himself seem like a mentally ill can be seen an urgent...
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...Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” written by Richard Rodriguez and “Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned” written by Lily Wong Fillmore, the authors are concerned about immigrants forgetting their native languages as they get Americanized. Both authors are targeting a mature audience of immigrants, which have come to America to become citizens. Both authors use concerned tone with hopes that their audience will want to contribute to change. Furthermore, Fillmore draws her evidence from stories of other writers’ essays. Rodriguez, on the other hand illustrates his evidence from personal experiences and memories of his life while growing up. This essay exemplifies the differences and similarity of the evidence used, tones, styles, and the intended audiences. Fillmore’s and Rodriguez’s evidence are similar and different, in their support of the idea of bilingual education in schools. Fillmore’s evidence differs from Rodriguez’s as she uses statics, research, and other writer’s quotes as her support. She uses this Supreme Court’s ruling to show that the court believes immigrants require assistance staying bilingual, “… Lau v. Nichols held that these children must be provided instructional help to overcome the linguistic barrier…” (Fillmore 260). She also cites the story of a Chinese immigrant family that falls apart as the kids became Americanized. Rodriguez supports his evidence by comparing the difference in his life. At the beginning of the essay he appears more...
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...the essay “Achievement of Desire” Rodriguez is known as “the scholarship boy.” He was the top of his class, because he was always reading books rather than spending time with his family and friends. He would isolate himself from them, as he thought education was the most important thing in his life and in order to gain that education, reading and doing well in school came first. Although when he was younger he did not like reading, “reading was, at best, only a chore”, he later realized “books are going to make me educated” (347-348). At home education was not the greatest, his parents had little education and he was so embarrassed of it. In the third grade he would come home from school and he would ask his parents for help but they would not understand. He stated “I was oddly annoyed when I was unable to get parental help with a homework assignment” (339). At some point everyone needs to get help at home with homework and if you aren’t able to like, Rodriguez, it would be very frustrating. The major problem that Rodriguez had was he wanted to advance himself so much that he separated himself from his home life, which caused him to lose sight of himself. When he was still living at home and going to school he would hardly have real conversations with his parents. His head was always in a book reading, to find ways to better his knowledge. After leaving home and attending college for a few months, he came back home and noticed that he and his parents were, “but lacking the same...
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...the essay “Achievement of Desire” Rodriguez is known as “the scholarship boy.” He was the top of his class, because he was always reading books rather than spending time with his family and friends. He would isolate himself from them, as he thought education was the most important thing in his life and in order to gain that education, reading and doing well in school came first. Although when he was younger he did not like reading, “reading was, at best, only a chore”, he later realized “books are going to make me educated” (347-348). At home education was not the greatest, his parents had little education and he was so embarrassed of it. In the third grade he would come home from school and he would ask his parents for help but they would not understand. He stated “I was oddly annoyed when I was unable to get parental help with a homework assignment” (339). At some point everyone needs to get help at home with homework and if you aren’t able to like, Rodriguez, it would be very frustrating. The major problem that Rodriguez had was he wanted to advance himself so much that he separated himself from his home life, which caused him to lose sight of himself. When he was still living at home and going to school he would hardly have real conversations with his parents. His head was always in a book reading, to find ways to better his knowledge. After leaving home and attending college for a few months, he came back home and noticed that he and his parents were, “but lacking the same...
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...Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodríguez Hunger of Memory is an autobiography of the writer Richard Rodríguez and his transition from youth to manhood told through a series of recollected stories. The premise of his writing was centered mainly on his struggle to maintain both his Mexican heritage and closeness to his Spanish-speaking family, while at the same time being assimilated into American culture and obtaining an advanced education. Within the book Richard Rodríguez illustrates his contempt for affirmative action and bilingual education, two practices that had directly burdened his life while growing up. One of his main conflicts was grounded in his own family unintentionally being pulled away from him by losing the most important medium of relation, their language. Through his narrative, Richard Rodríguez makes a convincing argument against the implementation of affirmative action, even as one who stood to benefit from the program. When he was very young, Richard Rodríguez immigrated to the United States with his family to live in a predominantly white-Anglo, middle class neighborhood in Sacramento, California. Rodríguez’s parents were poor, but what money they could scrape together they used to send their children to the local Roman Catholic elementary school, Sacred Heart. Rodríguez knew less than 50 words of English at the start of his attendance in school, leading him to be introverted and shy in class. He rarely spoke, and finally...
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...Lowell History History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had-- it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory, the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends-- a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose-- O there's a terrifying innocence in my face drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost. Robert Lowell Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, along with Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. He received his high school education at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he met and was influenced by the poet Richard Eberhart who taught at the school. Then Lowell...
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...All three of these individuals, Mark Mathabane, Richard Rodriguez, and Malcolm X come from different backgrounds. At one point in their life they all come across to how important the value of education really is. Education can open many doors and give you many great opportunities. But, my question to you is, how much time and effort are you ready to give for a successful life? Education was never really apart of Mark Mathabane’s life. He would put minimum effort in school thinking he would not be anything big in life. He was never the rich kid. But, all his point of view about education changed when he heard a story from his mother’s friend. “How did he die?” my mother asked in a sympathetic tone. “He shunned school and, instead, grew up...
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...Through the stories of Baca, Rodriguez, Fatima, and the film Quinceanera have shown us that, they are the representatives of the immigrants of working class. They want to exist in a civilized society, they need to overcome the barriers in their lives that is language. For many people in the host country, language is a simple matter, but it is really difficult for immigrants. Immigrants, especially the working class shows disparities in social class of American modern lifestyle through the language. Being immigrants are adapting to a new language that is not easy....
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...Name Professor Institution Date Family values and the meaning of education A family is a set up that comprises of parents and children. Families are however based on certain values, mostly introduced by the parents, and that dictate their relationship with not only their children but also interactions between the parents themselves. Since all members in a family share relations in common that are supposed to define them, the beliefs and practises set in a family are expected to accommodate everyone though this doesn`t imply overlooking the odds. Richard Rodriguez opens his essay by presenting himself as a middle-aged man who is confused on how to approach his parents to tell them about his gay personality. He strongly indicates that a family`s believe strongly defines a family. This is evident with the confusion that comes to his mind when he thinks of the correct word to use in such a scenario. He further goes on to give examples of his neighbours to allude to the different meanings of family values in the various countries. Rodriguez presents America as a country where the male gender dominates the female sex. However feminism is seen to be evolving as the role of the mother is seen to be changing. Economic constraints have pushed ladies to no longer stay at home looking after their children but rather join the fathers to bring fourth food on the table. Though in such families the parents expect their children to have a particular social upkeep that maintains morality., the...
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