Personal Decisions Essay

Through the narrative “The Scholarship Boy” I find few turning points that I notice a shift in the demeanor of Richard Rodriguez as well as how I perceive the story. First of all, it is made apparent to me that people acknowledge him for his successes by making remarks such as, “Your parents must be proud” or “How did you manage it? According to the opening paragraphs Rodriguez is seen as a model student. Although this may be true, the first turning point I find suggests otherwise as Rodriguez conveys, “For although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student…Always successful, always unconfident. Exhilarated by my process. Sad.” This quote changed my perspective of Rodriguez because of the negative emotion he expresses toward his family. By the same token, I recall my sister being an outstanding achiever throughout school, yet, she was similarly depressed as well as annoyed towards me and the rest of our family. This flashback assisted me in relating to Rodriguez’s emotions towards his successes. In the same fashion, I am supplied a grasp of his shift in tone and direction in the narrative.

In Richard Rodriguez essay “Scholarship Boy,” he explores his past, now as a thirty year old man, and gives his readers a very well painted picture of what a scholarship boy truly is. Rodriguez mentions that from an early age he had put a boundary between his school and home life. However, it is worth mentioning that in his younger years he almost seemed to attempt to force both lives together. He mentions how he would constantly correct his parent’s grammatical errors, or tell them what he had learned in an effort to hurt their feelings. In this way he had taken on a superior attitude towards his parents and did his best to shame them into becoming the type of parents he had yearned for; the parental figures he had come to find in his teachers.

Education means something different for everyone. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (33). The truth to this is that education affects us in every aspect of our lives. Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. In Rose’s exploration of the purpose of school, he also reflects on his personal experiences and how those experiences gave him tools that are applicable to his daily life. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, emphasizing how those experiences become crucial to one’s personal growth and potential.

In the narrative called ‘Scholarship Boy’, by Richard Rodriguez. One can say that the biggest turning point is when Mr. Rodriguez himself realizes, at the age of thirty. The biggest attribute to his success and determination is schooling as a young boy. This is when Mr. Rodriguez had to live two separate lives. One as a young boy eager and willing to learn and develop, and another as a son and sibling to his family. At the age of thirty he finally is able to come to terms with this fact and be able to talk about in public and not have to keep it bottled up any longer. During this time in his life he is writing his dissertation and finds a written piece by Richard Hoggarts called, ‘The Scholarship Boy’. At this point in his life he sees that he is not alone with his life struggles. This was figuratively like lifting weights off of Mr. Rodriguez’s shoulders, you can see how while telling this part of the story stress is taken off of him. It is interesting to see that during the entire narrative Mr. Rodriguez seems unappreciative and ungrateful for the life his parents had given him. He is obviously resentful to the idea that his parents didn’t appreciate or value the idea of education, or at the very least learning the primary language of a country they moved to. Nothing in the story states that they were ignorant parents and didn’t know how to do simple math, the struggle that kept his parents from being able to give Mr. Rodriguez the attention and affection but most of all

In “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts” Alfred Lubrano uses his personal experience with college education and his parents to come up with the statement: “Every bit of learning takes you further from your parents". In his writing, he goes over how his eyes were first opened to the idea that school could bring you further from your parents, when he read a book titled “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez”, where the writer was quoted as saying: “Home life is in the now, school life exists on an altogether different lane, with an eye towards the future”. Alfred’s belief throughout his article is that school brings you to a reality that separates and distances you from your parents and home-life.

After going through the case of Margie Whitson, the dilemma is the fact that Margie is looking to have her pacemaker removed which will in turn would end her life. So far, Margie Whitson has had a rough year and has come to the decision that she wants her pacemaker deactivated because she believes it is delaying her death. Her pacemaker is the only thing keeping her heart beating at this point. But even at that, her doctor, Dr. Vijay, refuses to deactivate it due to the fear of legal action/misunderstandings of the ethical and legal acceptability. Margie Whitson is very determined to have her pacemaker removed so she call for Jane Robison, the social

In “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts” Alfred Lubrano uses his personal experience with college education and his parents to come up with the statement that “Every bit of learning takes you further from your parents". In his writing, he goes over how his eyes were first opened to the idea that school could bring you further from your parents, when he read a book titled “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez”, where the writer was quoted as saying “Home life is in the now, school life exists on an altogether different lane, with an eye towards the future.” Alfred’s belief throughout his article is that school brings you to a reality that separates and distances you from your parents and home-life.

In his writing The Achievement of Desire, Richard Rodriguez describes his pursuit of academic achievement as a way to distance himself from his family as well as his cultural roots: “… A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that school was changing me and separating me from the life

Education is an ongoing process that one can never escape form. Whether if it is in an educational institution, exploring a new topic in the news, or hearing about different cultures, global or local, education fails at being able to completely leave someone alone. However, an end of education also depends on how someone defines it. Rodriguez defines learning as a desire to escape. It is an escape from family by abstracting himself from normal family/home habits - “he takes his first step toward academic success, away from his family,” (page 341). It is an escape from the life everyone expects of him especially being from a working class family to excel beyond the primary education his parents have had set for him, “He cannot afford to admire his parents,” (page 341). This “habit of abstracting from immediate experience” encloses Rodriguez in his lonely environment that he once craved into a community where communication between a reader and writer is nonexistent. By doing so he makes education and learning a chore or a task to strain to be

Maintaining relationships and and focusing on who is important is one way in which I try to combat becoming Hoggart’s definition of a “scholarship boy.” Throughout the excerpt, Rodriguez keeps reiterating the fact that while his schooling grew more intense and successful, he “couldn’t forget that [it] was changing [him] and separating [him] from the life [he] enjoyed before becoming a student” (Rodriguez 534). When I was in high school, I had two major relationships I had to maintain: family and friends. With numerous extra curriculars, rigorous courses, and a part-time job, this was hard at times. According to Haley Bess, these difficulties constitute “the lows” of high school; however, “having to balance a busy schedule...helps you learn time management” (Bess 2,3). On the other hand, Rodriguez would “spend more and more time studying...enclosing himself in the silence permitted and required by intense concentration,” (Rodriguez 536) separating himself from his family. I remember moments in which my Mom or Dad inquired about my day at school, and I had so much on my mind that I threw the questions to the side. Although, in these same moments I knew eventually, I would have to tell them. When the time was right, I updated my parents, and this made our relationship more connected and allow them to feel a part of the education that they are gifting to me. For example, instead of reading a book and keeping my reactions to myself like

When reading this autobiography it reminded me of my adolescent years; I remember feeling like I knew all there was to being a grown up, I also felt like my parents didn’t know much because they didn’t go to college. I strongly feel like they could have always done more than they were doing. Upon reading this, I felt as though I was reading Richard Rodriguez’s journal and he was a very unhappy kid living in the ghetto. He was also embarrassed of his own life and he seemed unhappy in his own skin... “(Ways of reading pg.339) A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that success was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student”.

Richard Rodriguez?s essay, Hunger of Memory, narrates the course of his educational career. Rodriguez tells of the unenthusiastic and disheartening factors that he had to endure along with his education such as isolation and lack of innovation. It becomes apparent that Rodriguez believes that only a select few go through the awful experiences that he underwent. But actually the contrary is true. The majority of students do go through the ?long, unglamorous, and demeaning process? of education, but for different reasons (Rodriguez, 68). Instead of pursuing education for the sake of learning, they pursue education for the sake of job placement.

In his essay “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez has certain ways of speaking and caring. In particular, he focuses on his education and his family. These two will eventually clash and interfere with each other. Rodriguez contrasts school, family, teachers and most importantly himself. He also tells us how left his childhood and family for education, but when he wanted to return he couldn’t fully do so. He learned he couldn't fully return due to his conforming to education that leads him to observe and analyze everything.

The idea that information is “deposited” from a teacher into a student fits the majority of Rodriguez’s educational experiences. As a young child, Rodriguez feels that “books were going to make [him] educated” (Rodriguez 578). He never questioned what he was told by his teachers or what he read in any book. He didn’t develop ideas of his own or any critical thinking skills. Rodriguez says that he was “a great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker; the very last person in class who ever feels obliged to have an opinion of his own” (Rodriguez 581). This type of education helps us to understand the relationships Rodriguez had with his “mentor” Richard Hoggart, as well as his school teachers and parents.

While reading Too Cool for School by Ellis Cose I have became aware of various aspects of my ‘schooling’ experience. I realized that I may not have had the best schooling experience, but I never pushed up against the system to get any better. Throughout my life I have attended over 10 schools some very high end others bottom of the barrel. Like Cose, I always knew my intellectual abilities, but I was always so dissatisfied with my situation I didn't make the best of it. Instead of soaking up as much knowledge as possible and making a lesson out of my situation I became complacent. I started to slack off and allow myself to become stagnant to what I knew my abilities were. I allowed myself to be a product of my environment when I should I have