Misunderstand By Richard Rodriguez Essay

Another way Rodriguez explores and conveys his conflicted feelings is with use of tropes. He uses rhetorical question, which is asking a question, not for the purpose of eliciting an answer but for the purpose of asserting or denying something obliquely. The most effective rhetorical questions in conveying his feelings is in the second to last paragraph. He questions things such as “How shall I present the argument between comedy and tragedy, this tension that describes my life? Shall I start with the boy’s chapter, then move toward more

Purpose: To highlight the difficulties students have at school and at home when it comes down to learning a language which they aren’t acquainted to and the consequences of such, depending on their social background.

style, he uses polysyndeton and run-on sentences for his syntax, and finally he uses dialect and

Rodriguez begins to become more involved in his classroom by his new grip on the English language. He shares fewer and fewer words with his mother and father. His tone now transforms into guilt. As Rodriguez's public language becomes more fluent, he forgets how to speak Spanish. "I would have been happier about my public success had I not recalled, sometimes, what it had been like earlier, when my family conveyed its intimacy through a set of conveniently private sound.? He begins to break out of the cocoon as a slow or disadvantaged child and blooms into a regular kid in his white society that only uses English. He feels a great sense of betrayal of his Mexican past. His connection that held him so close to his family is destabilized.

Rodriguez lost all connection with his family. He was unable to converse with them he had grown so far apart. Rodriguez felt “embarrassed” to embrace his personal background. He spoke of when his parents came to school and could not not speak English fluently and how it made him embarrassed because he did not want to profess his ethical background.

Rodriguez family was in the middle class, both his parents were not really educated. Growing up he could not go to them for help with his education because they struggled to understand it as well. Rodriguez felt that education was the path to success because that is what his teachers taught him. His core beliefs changed into ones of a scholarship boy. He drowned himself into reading and learning. In the essay Rodriguez never mentions anything of friends which is not surprising since he had disconnected from his family for his education. Therefore him disconnecting from his family also means he must have disconnected from friends. His parents were unable to help him with his school homework which made him decide that he did not want to be like them. Since he was a young child,

Newman states, “the most powerful institutional agent of socialization after the family, is education” (Newman 67). The public education system is tasked with not educating, but also socializing and defining student’s sense of self as they mature through

Rodriguez also shows us that he has gained the “sociological imagination” by writing about his appreciation and understanding

He states in one paragraph that “[i]t is not possible for a child — any child — ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life — a family’s ‘language’”(Rodriguez). The main focus of this essay is on the differences between intimacy and public conditions with regard to their effect on language. He establishes his claim through his usage of rhetorical devices such as juxtaposition and parallelism.

Rodriguez talks about how in America a person is encourage to stray away from the family and venture out and become their own man. In Kincaid´s essay she discusses how her mother was the worst, and that how that changed her. Which is the main similarity, Rodriguez grew up in an immigrant family, where the child´s life goal is to surpass his parents. Rodriguez writes,

Rodriguez also had to vanquish his tendencies of “abstracting from immediate experience,” - or pulling himself away from, and avoiding other people and the life around him. In order for him to make the realization that his education was overruling his life, he had finally had to step aside and see that it was negatively affecting his connections with his family. He caught on to the

Through this piece, Gray includes many premises to prove his point that the schooling has not taught children in this society any useful information. In doing so, he uses many unsubstantiated assumptions that make his argument invalid. He opens the essay with a logical fallacy by begging the question with the statement “Parents send their children to school with the best intentions, believing that's what they need to become productive and happy adults” (Gray, 2013, p.1). Although some parents do send their young to school in hopes that the children will become successful adults, some parents may do it for a different reason. Parents could send their children to school to get them out of their face or because society says they have to. Here, Gray made an assumption as to why parents send their children off to school, but he cannot

In Richard Rodriguez we see several tensions throughout his experiences and how they affected his upbringing on how he became the man he is today. At his own home he is separating himself from his family while also feeling a form of anger towards them. Nevertheless he thrives in his studies in the classroom. Despite his educational success he also is away from his peers. Since he is so dedicated on his studies he lacks time to interact with them because his free time is spent reading.

Sometimes, schools won't admit your child if they don't speak the local language. This makes a lot of sense, especially in areas that have languages very different from English, such as China or Taiwan.

Some of the ways which teachers acknowledged the importance of children native language was by providing a multicultural teaching approach to their class rooms. An example of this was the teacher who sang a hello song both in English and Spanish. Students are encouraged to speak their native language. We saw example of teaching referencing back to the students to help translate the word pie. They support their languages and culture by acknowledge the similarities and differences in the ways a word or phrase is said in their language versus the English language. Teachers with children who speak another