Analysis Of Hunger Of Memory By Richard Rodriguez

2169 Words9 Pages

In Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez writes about his struggles of assimilating to American and having to deal with the pain of learning a new language that he is not comfortable with Throughout the biography, Rodriguez also writes about the emotional toll that comes with assimilating to his country He speaks about the difference between public language which is English and private language which is his native tongue, Spanish. However, Rodriguez also writes about his gratification towards his parents. He elucidates that he is glad that he had the opportunity to better his education, even though it was difficult for him to do so. I agree with Rodriguez on the topic of learning English, but I also believe that once …show more content…

He states “shortly after, I stopped hearing high and loud sounds of los gringos,” (Rodriguez 20) He uses italics when saying ‘ los gringos’ to emphasize how he is no longer seeing English as a foreign language that only Americans can speak. He also states “ A more confident speaker of English, I didn’t trouble to listen to how strangers sounded, speaking to me,” (Rodriguez 21). Rodriguez conveys how now that he is familiar to the language when he speaks to strangers, he no longer looks for way to alienate himself from them by using the tone of their vocabulary because he now possess the same ability to speak English which makes both the stranger and him similar and therefore comfortable speaking the …show more content…

When I was younger I was enrolled into Bilingual classes since preschool which cost me dearly. While taking these classes I had trouble learning English and Spanish words at the same time. I struggled through elementary school because I was not used to focusing primarily on English which affected my grades. While it is true that colleges look for students who know more than one language, the problem with that requirement is that students who focus on two languages at once are more likely to fail their classes because they do not have their full attention directed towards the English language and they don’t pay attention to that factor. Colleges do not see the risk of being a bilingual student. I believe that students should be more focused on the top subject like math, English and science because those are the subjects that America is lacking. American schools are spending money on hiring bilingual teachers when they should be focusing more on hiring more English, science and math teachers. In a trail of US students against other countries “It found that students in the US are below average in math and placed in the bottom quarter of countries that participated and trail nations such as Estonia, China and Finland. More than half of the participating countries outscored U.S. kids.” In Polytechnic high school there is about one Ap chemistry teacher which limits the chances of every