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Summary Of The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

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How many times have you finished an exam only to forget the answers a couple of hours later? Did you have that knowledge in your mind? How many equations, dates or vocabulary have you memorized just before an exam and never use again?
Education plays a vital role in shaping the future. Creating workers, entrepreneur, and leaders, school is what gives you the skill necessary to strive for success. We are made to believe that the education system is to prepare us for the challenges of the adult life. However, the truth is that public school is an outdated system that is still clinging on to the ideas of if you do well in school, you will be successful. It's a system that choked out creativity and valued efficiency over mastery, pushing an incomplete …show more content…

In his writing, Rodriguez shows how education can be harmful to one’s culture by describing his experience with the system. In his school year, Rodriguez always seeks a higher education. To advance in school, Rodriguez separated himself from his home environment and lost connection with his root. He needed more time to study, so he isolated himself from his family to do well in school. As a result, he felt that home life is becoming less critical, taking him further away from his loved ones. “At home, life was less noisy than it had been. (I spoke to classmates and teachers more often each day than to family members.) Quiet at home, I sat with my papers for hours each night. I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life”(Rodriguez 537) Culture plays an important role in education and must be incorporated in the school system. To ignore a person culture is to reject a big part of their growth. The Prussian model is to blame for the loss of culture in the school system. The model was created as a way to implant absolute obedience in the students. It takes students who wanted to “succeed” in school from their culture and indoctrinate them. As a result, students are becoming “the great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker; the very last person in class to have an opinion of his own” (Rodriguez

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Rodriguez and Hoggart’s opinions of a “scholarship boy” are very in many ways yet contain underlying differences due to the fact that they both have their own unique opinion. Rodriguez generalizes by speaking in third person about the “scholarship boy” you can see the relationship between his overall ideas and his personal experience. He introduces Hoggart by providing a quote that states, “Perhaps as early as the night he brings home an assignment from school and finds the house too noisy for study” (548). A large quote is introduced and it almost seems as if there is no outside point of view being taken in. Rather, just an indented version of Rodriguez’s thoughts on the matter.

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After gaining a better knowledge of Chican@/Mexican-American individuals, it is clear there is a lack of understanding towards these unique cultures and narratives in exchange for assimilating students into a larger American culture. While some students, like Mora, are able to balance both their heritage and finding success in their education endeavors, many students either fail to achieve high success or drop their culture in exchange for not only the more dominant culture, but also higher levels of success and understanding of course material. Mora admits he is a unique outlier if one was to look at Chican@/Mexican-Americans as a whole. Not only did Mora have the opportunity to attend a successful high school, but he grew up in a middle-class household with parents who found moderate success in the business world.

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Hunger of Memory is a memoir of the educational experience of Richard Rodriguez and his journey as a first generation Mexican- American citizen. The book is compiled of a prologue, in which he states his reasons for writing, and six chapters with no specific chronological order. Richard Rodriguez grew up in a white, middle-class neighborhood and attended a Catholic school. He describes his early childhood as a war between his “public” and “private life”: a war between school and home. He struggled when he first started school, because English was his second language and he felt insecure about his shaky ability to communicate through it.

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How is this purpose conveyed? The audience for this piece are people who are interested in Rodriguez’s childhood and education and seeing how scholarship children can become successful. The writer’s purpose is to explain why and how he became a scholarship and academically successful in a bilingual household with the family’s main focus on Spanish. This purpose is shown as the writer takes the reader on a journey through his childhood.

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This presentation is based on language and identity. Rodriguez states that it was a struggle growing up in an English speaking environment because of his heritage. He didn’t feel like he fit in with the other kids at his school. He learned that going back and forth with switching languages had some positive and negative effect on him. Throughout his essay, he shows that after a while of practicing English he diverted from Spanish to English becoming his first language.

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Richard Rodriguez wrote, Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, in his essay he wrote about the problem he faced growing up as a bilingual Hispanic in America. Growing up as a Hispanic in United States was a struggle for Richard Rodriguez. This was because he was a Spanish speaking child and living in an English-speaking society. Rodriguez went to Roman Catholic school where many of his classmates were the children of business man, lawyers and doctors. Adjusting to the American culture helped Rodriguez feel more comfort among the other American students.

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Rodriguez uses the public vs private analogy multiple times in his essay. Spanish being the private language meaning that fewer people speak and know it, and that because it is private, people who speak it are at a disadvantage. He says, “What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right- and the obligation- to speak the public language of los gringos. ”(6-8) In the first grade, Rodruguez had to alter his personal life and individuality because English had to no

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Reading an essay must have two sets of eyes, one from a reader and another from a writer. I as a reader, found Rodriguez’s essay rude and relatable; his way for describing what happened to him shared a type of equality with me in a different perspective. On the other hand, reading his writing as a writer I can fully appreciate his way to weave ideas and enjoy vivid descriptions about his life. Rodriguez’s Essay embodies different writing techniques, such as voice and tone. His voice is direct and focus, he describes his life as plain as possible and describes each event so that the reader can follow him through his life.

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Rebuttal to Hunger of Memory Richard Rodriguez came from a Hispanic family that had little to no knowledge of the English language. That required his entire family to speak English at home and for him and his siblings to endeavor daily tutoring sessions. He stated in his memoir that learning the public language of English would drain the intimacy out of his first language: “Once I learned the public language it would never again be easy for me to hear intimate family voices (240).” This outlook has shaped his entire life.

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In the essay Rodriguez challenges the idea of bilingual education, he takes us through his personal experience of a bilingual childhood where he talks about what he encountered in America as he attempts to adjust to the American culture, and how he preserved his intimacy with his family even through the language barrier. Throughout the essay, we soon see that his identity and success is tied to the place and how he was raised, his parents are a major part of his success. Richard Rodriguez was Born in a Mexican immigrant family, him and he’s family moved to California, so he had to adapt to the new and unfamiliar situation, where the culture and language is completely different, therefore making him feel like he did not belong in the American culture. There was something Richard said that was really interesting, he said “An accident of geography sent me to a school where all my classmates were white.”

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In Richard Rodriguez’s essay, “The Achievement of Desire” he brings you through important memories of his life that impacted his education, and more specifically his reading and writing. As a child, he was eager to learn and ready to soak up all the knowledge he could get. He received many awards and good feedback from his teachers which gave him all the more motivation to learn more. Soon his motivation came out of annoyance of his parents.

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There is also the population who can not simply afford to get an education. This is where Benitez’s message on education starts to form and the audience is faced with conflicting sides of education or staying to support. The author’s message about education is that it is essential and very beneficial to anyone, which is shown in the scenario with Ines and Rafael, Beto and the teacher, as well as Candelario’s comments on education. When Rafael teaches Ines how to read and write is the perfect example of education helping the youth.

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Richard Rodriguez wrote “Scholarship Boy” to explain the range of conflicting emotions he felt over receiving an education while growing up at home with his immigrant parents. He enjoyed school and learned quickly, but soon he knew more than his parents could comprehend. He was ashamed of his parents for not knowing as much as he did and this drove him away from them and more towards his instructors and his books. Though his parents were proud of him, he struggled to feel anything but embarrassed of them and this affected how he viewed himself and the education he was blessed to have. When Gerald Gaff was young, he did not feel that books related to his life and that they, therefore, were not worth reading.

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Achieving an accurate education system is not an easy function for any nation. The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley, is a wonderful book that focusing on the important of the education and how can the changing on the education system and schools reforms change the whole country for the best. This book had a positive impact on me, it gives me hope that each country in the world can create stronger and more creative education system; a system that can achieve students and serves both equity and rigor. Importantly, that can happen if we think first what are our educational problems and how can we resolve them in a smart and wise way that can help us to have magnificent results that benefits everyone, the

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Teachers "You must go beyond and seek to understand the cultural context of each student" (Braley et al., 2016, pp. 259). Success looks different for each student and teachers should realize culture may be reflected in students' actions. Additionally, teachers may be teaching students at various comprehension levels and students with learning disabilities. In these instances, it is essential to learn about where difficulties lie for children and enhancing their learning by meeting them where they are with content they can

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