Dear all,
Welcome to our course blog! The prompt for this Sunday's Blog posts (due by midnight on Sun 9/25) is on the Announcements page on our D2L site. Please access it there and re-read the requirements for Blog posts in order to complete your Blog upload by Sunday evening. Also, IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS for Blog posts, so that we know who's who when posting:
Please begin each of your Blog posts with your FIRST NAME and LAST NAME INITIAL so that we know who you are!
As always, please feel free to email me with any questions.
Dr. O.
Ok so I'm not exactly sure how to post or create a blog. Do I want to "create a blog" or just "post" something? This is all new for me so I just hope I am not the only one confused about this part.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I am also confused? I dont see anywhere that says create blog or a section for this weeks essay. Or like she said do we just post a comment?
ReplyDeleteHi Hilary and Tiffany--you don't want to "create" a blog (because I already did that for all of us--we're a multi-author blog, which means EVERYONE in our class has the rights, once they accept the blog invitation--to post comments.
ReplyDeleteTo post your Blog entry for tonight, all you have to do is cut and paste it from Word (or whatever you've written it in) INTO the same Comment feature you just used to respond to my original post up there. You know how you clicked "Post Comment" to post your question? Use that to post your entry. Make sense? Please let me know if it does not! Dr. O.
Is this what you are looking for?
ReplyDelete-Tim Gonring
“Not for the working-class child alone is the adjustment to the classroom difficult. Good schooling requires that any student alter early childhood habits. But the working-class child is usually least prepared for the change. And, unlike many middle-class children, he goes home and sees in his parents aw way of life not only different but starkly opposed to that of the classroom (Rodriguez, 433).” This class spoke out to me because I thought it was pretty unique in the article itself. This pretty much sums up what he is talking about and why he is writing this article. He is saying that schooling is more difficult to adjust to for kids not only of the working-class, but for the middle-class too. He’s saying that in order to learn more easy and more efficiently, the child needs to get rid of certain habits and make his school life better. He goes on to say..”Without extraordinary determination and the great assistance of others-at home and at school-there is little chance for success (Rodriguez, 433).” From what it sounds like to me he’s making it seem like there is no chance for a child to succeed without support at home and at school. Personally, I kind of disagree with that. I have seen plenty of my personal friends do great in school and do well in life with flying colors even with a rough or unsupportive home life. The fact that it is not good almost seems to drive them to succeed not deter them. However I did agree with a different aspect of his article.
“But Hoggart’s calm prose only makes me recall the urgency with which I came to idolize my grammar school teachers. I began by imitating their accents, using their diction, trusting their every direction. The very first facts they dispensed, I grasped with awe. Any books they told me to read, I read---then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed. Their every casual opinion I came to adopt and to trumpet when I returned home (Rodriguez, 434.) I feel like I have seen this in many instances amongst kids I’ve worked with. If children find a teacher fascinating and desire to learn more, it is almost like they are waiting on the teacher’s every word. They strive to do what the teacher wishes because they have no real direction anywhere else. Once they respect and adult figure they latch on and try to please the instructor because they receive gratifying feelings back.
“From an early age I knew that my mother and father could read and write both Spanish and English. I had observed my father making his way through what, I now suppose, must have been income tax forms. On other occasions I waited apprehensively while my mother read onion-paper letters airmailed from Mexico with news of a relative’s illness or death (Rodriguez, 440.)” To me this says that all his parents knew or wanted to read or write for was necessity. I feel like Rodriguez is trying to tell us that we need to have the desire to learn in order to truly understand and to work a language. To use languages simply to function as a means of living is the wrong way. We must appreciate the language and have the desire to learn it in order to do well in school. If appreciation of text and literature is never expressed then it is hard to do well in school and to learn.
I can really draw some pretty similar things from both the Gere article and this one as well. They both seem to imply the fact that people learn when they learn that what they are doing is received in such a well manner and respected amongst people. When they receive gratifying compliments and acceptance from someone they seem like they want to do more of the action, which by all human nature makes sense. It seemed like both Gere and Rodriguez both expressed the same concepts in that desire is necessity in learning. The objective should be to influence the children to want to learn in life. If that is not accomplished then learning will be tarnished.
Hi Tim--in terms of how to post, YES! Thank you. It seems that since last spring (since I last used Blogger), Blogger has followed in the (annoying) footsteps of Facebook and changed a bunch of things around. If there is a better way to post to the weekly threads of our course Blog, I will find it when I meet with a colleague for assistance later this week. Stay tuned, Dr. O.
ReplyDeleteTiffany M..
ReplyDeleteWhile reading the, “The Achievement of Desire” I wasn’t really sure what the point was. I think he had a few different points in mind and that each person reading it could have taken a different idea of what he meant. While reading it I started thinking it was going to be a lot about his parents. To me it seemed like he kept putting them down or that he was never really trying to make the effort to redeem the past. On the bottom of page 435 he mentions how whenever his parents asked what was new he would just nod or barley respond. I understand it wasn’t his fault for not feeling or being different from his family it just seemed like he didn’t make any effort after about the second grade. Although, toward the end of this article I felt as if Rodriguez was kind of trying to make up for his past and also try to have others learn from his problems. On page 433 he says, “without great determination and the great assistance of others-at home or school-there is little chance for success.” I liked that quote however I didn’t really think it fit well in that point of the article.
Rodriguez’s article can teach someone a lot about education. I think not only as a student but a future teacher you can learn a few things from his article. On page 434-435 he states, “it was the nuns encouragement that mattered to me most-she understood what my parents never seemed to appraise so well.” In a way its showing teachers that students really look up to them and really take what they say seriously. Rodriguez really wanted to be like his teachers and I think that teachers really need to understand that because they have so many students looking up to them. In the article he states, “He relies on his teacher, depends on all that he hears in the classroom and reads in his book.” It just shows how students really take everything their teachers say and how they stick in the student’s minds.
I also think the word achievement plays a big part in the article. The word achievement in this context shows that nothing can be achieved without a great deal of effort, determination, and also desire. Even at a young age he was determined to figure out things for himself. The article really showed me that anyone can achieve something if they are really determined. It must have been tough not having your parents understand your homework but he worked past that. As you can tell from the whole article he had a desire for reading and writing and wouldn’t let anything come between him and that.
Now thinking about the Gere article in relation to this one I see some differences and yet similarities as well. I think that if Rodriguez would have been in Anne Geres’s classroom/article that people would have expected him to not become a scholarship boy or have been such a dedicated reader/writer. Gere thought writing helped people in more ways than just writing. It made me think maybe Rodriguez’s writing could have helped his family, or bring them closer together. They also both seem to agree on the fact that you need to help students self esteem with compliments and awards. As stated before, Richard really looked up to his teachers and took in everything they said to him. They both also think that writing can help a person figure out who they are, and I think that is important to know as a teacher.
I believe Ricardo Rodriguez wrote The Achievement of Desire to better understand his relationships between education and the outside world. Rodriguez at an early is pressed to take advantage of school and make a better life for himself through education. With the help of his parents and teachers education will allow himself to be reinvented into anything he wants. Despite being a middle-class Mexican American he believes that through education he can leave his past and gain a better future if he applies himself. Rodriguez became infatuated with being successful, but was not entirely sure what success meant. Throughout his academic career he focuses only on school work, primarily reading and as time passes he begins to realize that because of school he has disassociated himself with everything else He writes, “Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic success distances him from a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself” (P. 434). He realizes that receiving the ultimate education would eventually seclude him for his parents and surrounds. At an early age Rodriguez realizes that “he cannot afford to admire his parents” (P. 434) and instead “came to idolize my grammar school teachers” (P. 434). He excels in everything related to school and reads any book that is recommended by his teachers. Although, reading is good for everyone, I think that reading ultimately became his downfall. Rodriguez was so caught up in learning to impress that he never learned to learn or apply what he learned. He never formulated or offered his own opinion because he had the opinions of all the authors he had read. He writes, “He becomes in every obvious way the worst student, a dummy mouthing the opinions of others” (P. 446). Rodriguez quickly learns that all of his ambitions are in reality the ambitions of the authors and those who he modeled his life after. Later in life he reflects on his relationship with his parents and cannot explain his feeling for cultural separation until he is able to analyze his situation using his education. “If, because of schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about the fact” (P. 449). He read for the sake of reading and not because he desired to learn anything, but more so to feel accomplished.
ReplyDeleteRodriguez is trying to tell us that education comes with a price and that there is a difference between education and imitation. Education teaches you the process of how to apply knowledge and critically think. And imitation is what Rodriguez does throughout his academic career. “He does not forget that the classroom is responsible for the remaking him. He relies on his teacher, depends on all that he hears in the classroom and reads in his books. He becomes in every obvious way the worst student, a dummy mouthing the opinions of others” (P. 446).
Gere writes, "The most superficial aspects of writing receive the greatest attention, and the more complicated and important questions remain unasked and unanswered" (P. 87). In many ways I think Rodriguez reads to receive the greatest attention. Throughout his career he displays interest in reading only to be recognized from his teachers and role models.
After reading the “Achievement of Desire” article I was a little bit confused on what the main point of the article actually was. One of the main points that I got out of reading the article was the effect of the role and education of his parents played in his life. I felt like throughout the article Rodriguez was trying to prove that the reason he wanted to do so well in his own education was that he was disappointed and embarrassed at his parent’s lack of education. I felt like throughout the article he was kind of trying to prove that he was better than his parents because of where he was going in his education. I also felt like he was trying to separate him self from his parents because of their lack of education. For example near the bottom of page 431 he talks about his father trying to help him with math problems and reading the directions multiple times and then Rodriguez yells he will do it himself. In that moment of the article I really felt like even at such a young age he was trying to use his education to prove to his father that he was better than him because he was able to use his education to figure it out. I also think one of his other main points of the article was how his love for books and reading really helped him in his education. I think that Rodriguez was trying to get the point across the reading plays a really crucial role in everyone’s education just like it had in his own education. I think that he was trying to explain that reading not only helps people to become educated but it can also help people understand more about them selves and enjoy themselves. What I think Rodriguez was trying to say about education was that you can not let where you come from of what your background is hold you back from wanting to be educated, and enjoy being educated. I think he was also trying to say that you should not be embarrassed about your desire to continue learning. One quote that really made me think this was on page 432 “ From a very early age, I understood enough, just enough about my classroom experiences to keep what I knew repressed, hidden beneath layers of embarrassment”. This quote made me think that Rodriguez was trying to don’t let you drive to become more educated or your lack of education embarrass you. I think he was trying to say that it’s okay to have a drive to keep learning, and it is not something that should be looked at as a negative. After reading the Rodriguez article there was one connection that really hit me between this article and the Gere article. That connection was how reading, and writing can do more for a person than just benefit them academically. I got the connection that how writing in the Gere article could help build self confidence and pride in people , reading helped Rodriguez want to continue learning and to help other learn and reading was something for him that he truly loved to do not something he had to do.
ReplyDeleteJeremiah S part I
ReplyDelete“The Achievement of Desire,” by Richard Rodriguez, was a fast read for me, but it took me a much longer time to determine what Rodriguez was actually saying about his education, and the state of education in general. It might be safe to say I am still not sure. It seems as if the first half of the piece focused solely on his desire to be “educated,” and when we use educated in his context, it almost means to be taken to a level, academically speaking, far from where his parents were and far from the place they would ever have been able to achieve. This leads me to wonder if this is the desire he strove for. Was it the desire to be educated or the desire to surpass the education of his parents, the level of which he seemed to resent? To support these thoughts, I found that I needed to go through the text another time and search for what Rodriguez really meant to be “The Achievement of Desire.”
As Rodriguez became what he considered to be “educated,” there was a growing separation between him and his parents. He “proudly announced—to my family’s startled science—that a teacher had said I was losing all trace of a Spanish accent. I was oddly annoyed when I was unable to get parental help on a homework assignment. (p 431)” Losing his accent was a step in his literary education that proved to himself he was going beyond the literacy of his parents. Their lack of ability to help him with his assignments further drove this separation. Most of all, his desire for education greater than his parents was surfacing. The imagery of this separation continued throughout the piece.
It’s interesting that throughout reading this piece I kept reversing the title to be “The Desire of Achievement.” Rodriguez’s strong desire for education seems to be what drove him. He said “ambition set me apart. (p 431)” Again, his strong, almost innate desire separated from his family. Perhaps this piece is titled “The Achievement of Desire” instead of the reverse because his desire was thought to be unusual for a person of his background. It was this desire—and the achievement of it—that lead him to be “scholarship boy.”
Rodriguez goes on to state “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget the schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student. (p 432)” This strong statement touches on the surface for his desire to achieve, but it disturbs me because it only scratches the surface. So he wants to move beyond his parents and his family, it gives him joy to obtain this academic success. However, he never as far as I see it, he never really gets to the “why.”
There is a bit of irony in his desire for academic success. To his parents, education represented opportunity. “Get all the education you can. In schooling she recognized the key to job advancement. And with that remark she remembered her past. (p. 437)” This is an ironic and bittersweet statement, because not only did Rodriguez have the desire to pursue academics, but he was encouraged to. His mother’s encouragement would further drive their separation. The comment—“And with that remark, she remembered her past,” perhaps refers to some separation she had with her parents. Maybe for that moment she remembered she was encouraged in the same way, but only took that desire so far. Or, maybe there was no desire, just encouragement. How far would one get with just encouragement? Does desire need to be present as well?
Jeremiah S part II
ReplyDeleteThe second half of the piece focuses more on Rodriguez as a student, and the kind of student that he was. This is where I began to connect the piece to Gere’s. He talks extensively about his extensive reading, but despite that, he did not claim to be a good reader. He “lacked a point of view when he read. (p. 443). Instead, he stated he was reading for a point of view. I got the sense his reading was strictly to advance himself academically, not for the joy or self-examination it could spark. Gere might state he was reading strictly the “curriculum” but ignoring any of the “extracurriculum” surrounding him. Rodriguez states he “felt drawn by professionalism to the edge of sterility, capable of no more than pedantic, lifeless, unassailable prose. (p 448)” This was exactly the type of academia Gere was railing against!
I really enjoyed this essay and think there are many more overlaps with Gere’s themes as well. I still have a lot of open questions. I think Rodriguez is saying there is much more to education than academic literacy, but that realization often is a long time coming for most students. The title is still perplexing to me as well. Is he saying despite his circumstances he was still able to achieve the desire for education? It seems to me he had more of a strong, innate desire for achievement.
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ReplyDeleteI really found Rodriguez’s article interesting to read. In his explanation of his development as an academic I felt myself identifying with a lot of what he said. Similar to him I found myself and still do find myself isolated more and more from my family as my education continues. Neither of my parents furthered their education beyond high school and even then didn’t really take their education seriously. However in my primary education I found myself succeeding with little or no help from home, like Rodriguez experienced, when my parents attempted to help me with my advanced courses, they simply did not understand the content well enough to be of any help and I early on, stopped asking them for help or even having conversations with them about my current studies. This led to a great distinction between my home life and school life like Rodriguez described. From an early age I remember even thinking down about my parents lack of education, even insulting them. I remember distinctly trying to tell my father about something I was learning and when he didn’t seem to understand, I said to him, “Don’t think too much, I don’t want your brain to hurt.” For some reason I thought maybe his brain was just incapable of understanding what I was saying. What an awful thing for me to say!
ReplyDeleteI think in this article Rodriguez shows insight on how education is taken very differently for different people. For some, education has little to no effect on them. According to Rodriguez, especially in lower class people, education just isn’t taken seriously by most students. But for some, “the exceptions”, it is taken seriously and taken to an extreme. In Rodriguez’s case he claimed his education and felt enthusiasm for his education. He thought of it as a means to further himself in life but realized that it in fact expanded himself within his own world. He described the books he read as opening doors in his mind. Something that he felt, without his studies, those doors would have never been opened. I can certainly relate to that. I know, with the more classes I take on a variety of subjects, my mind is constantly expanding. My mind operates differently, thinks differently and processes things differently all of the time. I can even see one powerful article that I may read help shape my mind. Sometime these articles plant a seed in my head that grows and expands long after I have completed reading or thinking about the actual text. I have also seen this expansion then move on and shape other areas or processes in my mind that are unrelated to the specific topic. I really think that is amazing and it is very fun to see and be aware of this happening in my mind.
I think Rodriguez’s story showcases how education can really be influential on a person and affect more than just their GPA. Education can really take and shape a person in ways that go way beyond the classroom and therefore have an effect of every aspect of a person’s life.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the title of this article, I am not really sure what Rodriguez is getting at. I think desire is needed to really have achievement. Obviously without true desire someone may be able to go through the motions of an educational system but to really feel the full effect of an education and studies one has to have the desire to really allow what your learning to penetrate into your brain. With that desire and ability to take in everything in your studies, you achievement can be much different than those of your peers in your classroom environment. I really think a thorough education can really take you to a higher level of consciousness. And for many people, they may never get to that level, with or without an education.
I think Gere and Rodriguez are pushing us to think outside of our normal education, that going through the motions and accepting things at face value are simply not enough. Our education and literacy are much more than a diploma or a good GPA. Literacy can even be influential and powerful even for someone without an academic career or training. Literacy is not necessarily what our teachers teach us, or what is right or wrong, it is a way to see things, how to see them, despite what an academy or an institution may say is or isn’t important. Just because something is taught a certain way or things are stated as facts or concepts, that doesn’t mean that’s how we need to hold them, and there is not necessarily absolute answers for anything, especially in literature.
As I read “Achievement of Desire”, by Richard Rodriguez, I was immediately drawn into the material. He sums up the reason behind his success with a single statement, “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student” (p.432). I believe that this statement shows how schooling and the acquisition of knowledge compelled him to press forward and become more determined to continue to study and learn. Although he loved his family, his schooling widened the gap between his two very different worlds.
ReplyDeleteAs he became more engrossed in his studies, more he lost touch with the realities of his life at home all the more. He also begins to discuss the “scholarship boy”, whom which he states, “must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed” (p. 432). This student moves between both worlds, but in time seems to become mentally and emotionally removed from the realities of life at home.
I believe that purposes in sharing his experiences with us is to show the cultural challenges that children may face in the classroom environment. His experience is very relatable, and as I read the article I attested to many of the points he made. On page 431 he talks about becoming frustrated when his dad was not able to help him with a homework assignment. As future educators, we have to realize that students life outside of the classroom presents its own set of challenges, be able to address the child as a whole. We have to take into consideration what they go through on a daily basis. Even though Rodriguez described his parents as supportive, they had their limitations.
Rodriguez’s personal story shows the transference of authority from his parents to his teachers. He no longer admired his parents, but instead idolized his teachers. “He permits himself embarrassment at their lack of education” (page 434). He shows how the role of a teacher is actually more than a job or career choice, and the amount of influence that they have upon their students. As a child, whenever his success was mentioned, he always gave credit to his parents, when in actuality he felt that they had nothing to do with who he was becoming. He felt that credit was mostly due to them because they worked hard to pay for his schooling and make it possible for him to receive a quality education.
This idea is very real for many students who face barriers at home and can only become themselves within the comfort of a book, or behind their pens as they write and share with others who are like-minded and can relate to their ideas, especially when dealing with urban students. It is important for educators to reach out to families and work with students in every possible way, while not overstepping the boundaries into the role of a parent.
Hilary P.
ReplyDeleteI think that Rodriguez shared his education experiences with the world so others would know that they are not the only one’s out there thinking “am I the only that feels distanced from family by my education?” Part of me wants to say that he shared his experiences with the world to get his voice out there and to be heard, but then there is a part of me that thinks he shared this so others wouldn’t feel so alone while getting their education. Also, from what I got out of the article, was that he feels that although he went through so much education, he feels like he hasn’t really learned anything but to become a mimic. “He becomes in every obvious way the worst student, a dummy mouthing the opinions of others. But he would not be so bad—nor would he become so successful, a scholarship boy—if he did not accurately perceive that the best synonym for primary ‘education’ is ‘imitation’,” (446). Perhaps all a student is in his eyes is a person that becomes extremely good at imitating others.
I believe that what he says about education is an extreme learning experience for him. At one point he states that “although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student,” (431). He states that when he was in the second grade he would come home and grammatically correct his parents then later on the same page he states that when he reached the third grade he “became more tactful, careful to keep separate the two very different worlds of my day.” Learning to do this at such a young age is almost a natural process for kids now. I’m not sure if it’s fortunate or unfortunate that he felt he had to keep his family life and his school life separate. Rodriguez becoming educated and reading as much as he did helped him grow as a person, even if he states that his life became nostalgic. Yes, he read and read all the time but in the end I believe that helped him not only speak and write English but also helped him to understand things better. “…for weeks I read, speed-read, books by modern educational theorists, only to find infrequent and slight mention of students like me… For the first time I realized that there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame the meaning of academic success, its consequent price—the loss,” (432). The loss being the loss he feels that connects him with his family life. I think that he titled this article “The Achievement of Desire” because it tells of what he wanted and, in the end, he got what he wanted. When he was younger, he told his mother that he wants to become a teacher, not to teach students exactly, but to feel proud in getting through to his students the way his teachers got through to him. That’s why he went to school. He gained so much knowledge that towards the end he realized just how much of his family he felt he lost; how much he had sacrificed to get the education he thought he wanted.
“It would require many more years of schooling (an inevitable miseducation) in which I came to trust the silence of reading and the habit of abstracting from immediate experience—moving away from a life of closeness and immediacy I remembered with my parents, growing older—before I turned unafraid to desire the past, and thereby achieved what had eluded me for so long—the end of education.” (449)
The only connection I really see between Gere’s writing and Rodriguez’s article is that one, Gere, believes that it doesn’t matter how good of an education a person has to write, all they need to do is write and get feedback, positive or negative, to feel accomplished. While Rodriguez’s article is about how much literature he read and how much schooling he got to feel accomplished just to realize how much he missed his family and that all he really ended up wanting was to be done with education. At least that’s the connection I see between the two articles.
Dear all,
ReplyDeleteOkay! So it looks like a whole bunch of folk were able to post successfully to the Blog. I've asked around the department this morning in between my f2f classes and it sounds like the kind of problems some of you are describing have to do with typical, intermittent system outages (i.e. Google outages).
Later this evening I will continue to try to find out what's what--I am not sure why, when you paste your words into this box I'm typing in right now, and then click on "post comment," the dang thing won't let you post (or, worse yet, would boot you out/automatically log you out--seems so odd!). But frankly I would not put anything past Google at this point (or any of these entities).
Again, you will not be penalized for posting to this site "late" (or whatever). If Blogger has changed, and it really seems like it has since last spring, then it stands to reason that it's going to take some time to figure the kinks out.
More soon, and again, in the interim please use all of the posts above for your Discussion Forum post tomorrow evening!
I found this essay by Richard Rodriguez to be somewhat unsettling. In this essay Rodriguez relates how his academic education despite its many benefits, served to alienate him from his family and culture. Further Rodriguez describes his education to have been empty as far as substance. He felt that he did not develop his own opinions or ideas through school and readings, he just regurgitated up the information that he memorized. Overall, Rodriguez concludes that he didn’t really find his own voice until he ended his education.
ReplyDeleteRodriguez continually refers to himself as a “scholarship boy” throughout the article, meaning a student from a poor and/or uneducated family who excels beyond what would be expected of him based on his demographic. He states, “I was a certain kind of scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always unconfident.” (pg. 431) Rodriguez tells us that his academic success was based more on extrinsic motivation, mainly the praise and approval of teachers, rather than a genuine love of learning. Further, Rodriguez explains that becoming a scholarship boy removed him more and more from his Mexican immigrant family. He quotes from Hoggart, “What he grasps very well is that the scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and his classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed.” (pg. 432) He felt embarrassed by his parent’s lack of education and English fluency which he came to see as a sign of one’s worth. His relationship with his parents also grew more distant as he became more and more driven by academia and “important books.”
It seems that Rodriguez found in retrospect that his academic education was detrimental to him in many ways. He describes always being nervous and seeking approval. As I mentioned above, he also claims to not have developed any critical thinking skills, ideas, or opinions or his own. He states, “I was not a good reader. Merely bookish, I lacked a point of view when I read. Rather, I read to acquire a point of view.” While he has clearly become successful because of his education, Rodriguez also stresses what he has lost in life by becoming the “scholarship boy.”
I believe Rodriguez is trying to convey that too much emphasis is placed on the value of a good education. Conversely, he is also saying that people are judged unfairly by lack of education. His parents, for example, had many skill sets, cultural knowledge, and other assets despite their limited English proficiency and lack of college education. Yet, Rodriguez felt embarrassed by them. He placed the idea of a scholarly educated man on a pedestal in his own mind, striving for that image rather than striving for real knowledge. I believe Rodriguez tells us these things about himself to demonstrate how prevalent these same perceptions are in our culture and educational system. More emphasis needs to be placed on intellectual development instead of becoming well read or scholarly.
Gere and Rodriguez made very similar points in their essays. Gere described the how the teaching of composition in schools and colleges neglected the points of view of those not considered “scholarly”. She stated she felt that the field of composition purposefully neglected extracurricular writers in order to gain credibility. Rodriguez describes himself in a similar way; he neglects his cultural background and own creativity in order to gain what he perceived as credibility. My interpretation of both authors is that they criticized this point of view and indicated that a broader, more inclusive perspective would be more positive for learners.