...Sherman Alexie ENG 150 – Critical Analysis Assignment Fingerprints Recently, I was introduced to a man named Sherman Alexie. See, what I liked about Sherman from the beginning was the dissimilarity we shared. Too often, as a society we get so caught up in the bait of commonality that we forget it’s the differences that make us individuals. His family was not like mine. The significant values that shape a young man’s life, like Sherman’s and mine, were founded on different life experiences and were respected on unfamiliar levels. I came to see he loved differently and for different reasons. He esteemed for different reasons and his perception on life was remarkable yet understated. Sherman had a way of seeing things… the realness he bestowed was astonishing, but more importantly, he was able to help me see differently too. You’re asking, “Where did you meet this Sherman Alexie?” The answer to that question is difficult to state because I feel like I’ve known him my whole life, but I doubt he’d say the same of me. The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian is a novel by Sherman Alexie written for anyone willing to read it. It displays his inner deepest thoughts through the story of a young man named Junior. The great thing about being introduced to a man through his work is that he reveals himself to you through nothing but the deepest and best thoughts; and Sherman had many. Sherman Alexie was a Native American who grew up on a reservation in Spokane...
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...boundaries? For Sherman Alexie the answer is yes. He is a Spokane Indian and also a prominent writer. He is the author of “Superman and Me” a short essay first published in Los Angeles Times, April 19 1998, as part of the series “The Joy of Reading and Writing”. In this piece Alexie describes how he taught himself how to read at the age of three and how he manage to literally read his way out of the reservation in which he grew up. By narrating his own story, he illustrates how few were the chances for him as well as for all young Indians in a reservation to succeed in life, not only because of poverty or because of the limited school system, but more precisely because of the mental barriers Indians have imposed themselves when exposed to the challenges of the Non-Indian society. In contrast to this panorama, and against all statistics and predictions, Alexie succeeded...
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...In the essay “Superman and Me”, an extended metaphor is used to explain the connection between the author and Superman. Superman and the author have had a strong connection for a long time. When Sherman Alexie was three years old, he picked up a Superman comic while lying in the floor. Alexie’s dad always brought home books all the time, so Alexie read all the time. Superman and the author have always been together through Alexie’s childhood, school days, and adulthood. In Alexie’s childhood he was teased for being an indian child so he decided to stand out from the rest. “ I learned to read with a Superman comic.” This explains that Alexie was a young prodigy in school while others struggled. “I was three years old…” This shows that Alexie...
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...In his short autobiographical essay “Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie uses powerful sentences, visualization, and repetition to create a well-written vivid story. Alexie addresses his own childhood experiences with education. He was a young boy that lived in poverty on an Indian reservation where Indians were derided for being educated. He states that “Indian children were expected to fail in the non-Indian world” (Alexie 584). His parents would be considered poor in most western standards, but to reservation standards they were a middle-class family. Even with the odds of expectation and poverty against him, Alexie describes how he escaped these circumstances by teaching himself how to read. This ambition for success derived from his father who had a passion for reading. Because of his love and dedication to his father, he decided to have the same passion. Before he could read words he was able to review his father’s books and distinguish what a paragraph was. This initiated his path to success by comparing everything in his life to a paragraph “a paragraph was a fence that...
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...In Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the protagonist in the story is a 14-year old boy named Arnold Spirit Jr., a.k.a Junior, which they call him throughout the story most of the time. The novel begins with Junior explaining how he is Native American and lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation with his mom, dad, sister, and grandmother (Alexie 1-6). He clarifies how he was born with water on his brain, and because of this, he gets treated poorly at school. Kids call him a retard, they pants him, and they shove his head into the toilet (3-4). On the reservation, Rowdy is Junior’s best friend and pretty much his only friend. Rowdy protects and stands up for Junior when he needs help (15-18). The main conflict in the novel is Junior struggling at Wellpinit, which is his school on the reservation and how he transfers to his new school, Reardan. When he transfers to Reardan, he meets Penelope who he has a big crush on and Roger who is the most popular guy in the school. At first, he does not really get along with them, but in the end, they become the best of friends. Junior discovers that no matter where he goes he gets bullied....
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...However, Malcom X, the author of the short story "Hair", demonstrates that conforming to societies norms only leads to self-degradation. Similarly, Julia Alvarez, the author of the novel, I Want to Be Miss America, displays that by following gender based norms they lead to indignity. In comparison, to Danielle Belton, the author of "To Assimilate or Not: The Black Person's Lament", emphasizes that assimilating is a huge waste of time, and in order to become formal you have to assimilate to an extent. Also, Sherman Alexie, the author of the novel Hope Against Hope, highlights that people should go against the odds to reach their potential, instead it be killed off. All six sources suggest their own point of view regarding how someone should assimilate. While assimilating into another culture helps one's sense of belonging, assimilating can cause one to lose their identity. Despite these costs, one should prioritize the beneficial opportunities as they can positively affect them in the...
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...That way, they will be more attentive to the points that he is making. By including this appeal, Alexie is able to make another bridge between the sciences and the humanities. How Indian children were treated in school refers to sociology, and mentioning his miserable, mournful, mentality, speaks to Alexie’s cognitive thinking. Alexie makes this bridge in order to to explain how society’s treatment of people have profound effects on the development of an individual’s mind. His audience can further understand Alexie’s points on inequality, and begin to examine how it has affected their growth. In the six paragraph, Alexie begins by using strong diction to describe the effect society’s inequalities had on him through an appeal to pathos. Alexie claims that a smart Indian is “widely feared and ridiculed,” by all social groups because Indian children are “expected to be stupid.” The strong...
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...Turning On the Light: The Role of Darkness in the Search for Enlightenment Your fingers scrabble blindly against the wall of the dark room, searching for the familiar shape of a light switch. The recognizable protrusion appears beneath your fingertips and with a crackle the fluorescent light of your dorm room flickers on. In that second of searching, all manner of monster and fiend flashed before your eyes, lurking in the shadows. In this sense, the looming darkness was both your barrier – sightlessly scrambling for the light switch – and your impetus – wanting to turn on the light to dispel the gloom. Expanding beyond the awkward, floundering quest for a missing light switch, the dark of life is often what both obstructs and drives the pursuit...
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...physically or socially imprisoned. What would it feel like to be completely stripped of all rights, like a prisoner? To live with the expectation that you were never going to be anyone special and that there was no point in even trying? Would you still have hope? Would you still want to try to better yourself, or would you let opinions of others mold you into their idea of what is expected? People deal with this in everyday life. The recidivism rate in this country is absurd due in large part to the idea that once you own the moniker “prisoner” that is all you will ever be. There are families that foster the idea of educating oneself as an unnecessary endeavor and perhaps even a lofty aspiration. There are people that fold to such expectations, and then there are those who defy them. Malcom X is an amazing example of a person who breaks the chains of expectations by transforming into a prisoner who pursues his “homemade education.” In “Learning to Read”, Malcom X advances himself in education and becomes an entirely different person. In the “Bard Prison Initiative”, on 60 seconds we find prisoners challenging preconceived notions by engaging in a rigorous academic program inside the prison. Sherman Alexie in “Superman and Me” goes against the grain of the common belief that Native Americans are not intelligent people, and that they are people who never engage in trying to better themselves. Alexie pushes with determination to discover that Native Americans are...
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...Using Facebook to Teach Rhetorical Analysis Jane Mathison Fife The attraction of Facebook is a puzzle to many people over the age of thirtyfive, and that includes most college faculty. Yet students confess to spending significant amounts of time on Facebook, sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in class discussions and activities. This common reaction reflects James King and David O’Brien’s (2002: 42) characterization of the dichotomy teachers often perceive between school and nonschool literacy activities (although they are not referring to Facebook specifically): “From teachers’ perspectives, all of these presumably pleasurable experiences with multimedia detract from students’ engagement with their real work. Within the classroom economy technology work is time off task; it is classified as a sort of leisure recreational activity.” This dichotomy can be broken down, though; students’ enthusiasm for and immersion in these nonacademic literacies can be used to complement their learning of critical inquiry and traditional academic concepts like rhetorical analysis. Although they read these texts daily...
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...Resources for Teaching Prepared by Lynette Ledoux Copyright © 2007 by Bedford/St. Martin’s All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. 2 1 f e 0 9 d c 8 7 b a For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000) ISBN-10: 0–312–44705–1 ISBN-13: 978–0–312–44705–2 Instructors who have adopted Rereading America, Seventh Edition, as a textbook for a course are authorized to duplicate portions of this manual for their students. Preface This isn’t really a teacher’s manual, not, at least, in the sense of a catechism of questions and correct answers and interpretations. Because the questions provided after each selection in Rereading America are meant to stimulate dialogue and debate — to generate rather than terminate discourse — they rarely lend themselves to a single appropriate response. So, while we’ll try to clarify what we had in mind when framing a few of the knottier questions, we won’t be offering you a list of “right” answers. Instead, regard this manual as your personal support group. Since the publication of the first edition, we’ve had the chance to learn from the experiences of hundreds of instructors nationwide, and we’d like to use this manual as a forum where we can share some of their concerns, suggestions, experiments, and hints. We’ll begin with a roundtable on issues you’ll probably want to address before you meet your class. In the first section of this manual, we’ll discuss approaches to...
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