Summary Of Richard Rodriguez's The Achievement Of Desire

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 for 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.

Richard Rodriguez composed an essay called "The Achievement of Desire" which was published in 1982. Rodriguez’s essay is an autobiography that explains the essential struggle a scholarship boy has between life at home and at school. When Rodriguez starts his education process he starts to becomes disappointed with his parents' education. With his parents lack of education, Richard started to feel embarrassed. So, he begins to slowly distance himself away from his family to follow the educational goals he felt were more important.

Mike Rose is anything but average: he has published poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and two widely praised books on education in Amer­ica. A professor in the School of Education at UCLA, Rose has won awards from the National Academy of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Below you'll read the story of how this highly successful teacher and writer started high school in the "vocational education" track, learning dead-end skills from teachers who were often underprepared or incompetent. Rose shows that students whom the system has written off can have tremendous unreal­ized potential, and his critique of the school system

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.

The goal of wanting to succeed is quite natural for everyone. It is not unjust to assume that all students want to become successful as well. However, some students are more determined to succeed than others and take extreme steps to do so. Richard Rodriguez’s The Scholarship Boy discusses the issue with scholarship students. He argues the overachieving student has an eager obsession with learning. Although Rodriguez addresses the scholarship boy obsession with success, he fails to describe the undergoing stress of the overachieving student.

In the chapter 2 of the book Hunger of Memory: “The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez, he talks about how he attains academic success in expense of the life he used to love prior to stepping in school. Rodriguez starts his education having little to no knowledge of speaking English but with sufficient support of his parents and the parochial school in which he learns to do grammar, he later finds himself studying at British Museum. However, he argues that he achieves his success because of being a scholarship boy. He describes himself as an enthusiastic student and unconfident, opposite to his siblings, but his enthusiasm to learn became problematic at home as he starts to see the dissimilarity between home and school and when he is unable to receive academic help from his parents. Thus, force him to adapt and commit himself to study, he starts to read book to isolate himself at home. His persistent to learn became the reason to lose his balance between the two worlds he lives in. Rodriguez admits “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” (2).

Many are quick to disregard education’s role outside of the classroom. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (Rose 33). 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. By reflecting on his personal experiences and how those gave him the tools applicable to his daily life, he emphasizes why education should never be overlooked. Rose’s referencing relatable experiences in a logical manner makes his argument persuasive to the readers and he succeeds in making the readers reconsider why education matters to them. In his book Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike Rose effectively 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 our everyday lives.

In the “The Achievement of Desire” and “Para Teresa” Richard Rodriguez and Inez Avila describe the troubles of balancing life at home and at school. Rodriguez conveys the difficulties he had to face separating from his own culture to achieve academic success. His article portrays the cultural world and the educational world as separate institutions that cannot coexist in America. Throughout his text Rodriguez provides detailed experiences in order to explain his thought process. Inez Avila however presents her article as a letter dedicated to a school bully. In contrast to Rodriguez perspective Avila wrote her poem in English and Spanish to appeal to Mexican -American culture. She walks the reader through an argument between her and a fellow classmate as she was cornered in a bathroom. Her poem depicts how children who share the same culture discriminate within their own community. Both these articles are told from a Latino-American point of view yet they radically differ from each other.

Education gives common people the means to turning dreams into reality. Education allows common people to open up their minds to various possibilities, that will arise from becoming educated. But, yet there are times where our education systems do not uphold student/learners to a high norm. Although, problems with education systems rarely occur, inadequate performance in school can be feasible if there are issues within the child’s household. Nonetheless, students who face inconsistent dilemmas, fail since they attempt to solve both problems.

In this editorial it states that many students are influenced by their communities and their, “Lower expectations.” Because of these lower expectations, which create a lack of competition, students no longer have the urge to succeed or to be better than another. There is a major difference in the, “Environments

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.

William Deresiewicz does an on key job at analyzing and capturing the typical experience of today's over achieving student population. We are scared. The analogy of the calm on the surface “Stanford duck” reaches far past the campus limits of Stanford and into college campuses all around America. An example of this was a young Nicholas Barne of The University of Chicago. Alone in his dorm room Nicholas was paddling away, day in and day out, to reach his constantly shifting goals. Too afraid to derail from the status quo set at an early age by his parents and peers, and too afraid to decisively follow any inkling of passion that would put an end to the versatility of his “stem cell” ambitious college student state, Nicholas just kept paddling into the center of a dark lake, ever expanding around him in all directions. The only thing to stopp Nicholas’ paddling would be his untimely death on UChicago's

Ever since Richard Rodriguez stepped into the world of education, he had a thirst for knowledge. Also, at a very young age, Richard began to see a divide between the two most important aspects of his life, his family and his education. Through out the essay, “The Achievement of Desire”, Rodriguez describes himself as a “scholarship boy” and defines the term as one who is a good student, but a troubled son. After reading “The Achievement of Desire”, Rodriguez explains through his personal experiences with education that there is a conflicting relationship between school and family. Rodriguez tries to convey a very important message to students that are similar to him in that there is a balance of education and family and without either, happiness

In Mary Sherry’s essay “The Praise in the “F” Word” she discusses a technique that should be used to motivate students to do better in school. Sherry argues that the threat of failure motivates a student to apply themselves in school in order to succeed. Students who have a healthy fear of failure tend to be motivated to do better because something they desire is a risk. Many high school teachers have also awarded students with a passing grade although they actually deserved a failing grade simply because of pity. The fear of failure is the best tool to use on students in order to help them succeed and to push them for a brighter future.

Richard Rodriguez unconsciously weaves sensuality into his essay, “The Achievement of Desire”, by associating academia with physicality and intimacy. The sexual attraction between the opposite genders has the highest degree of enthusiasm in academics as per Rodrigues’s essay. For instance, the girls in the classroom are completely distracted from their classwork by a young boy passing by their class. Sensuality therefore has a negative impact on academics. Instead of the girls concentrating on what their instructor is teaching; they are entirely attracted to an outsider (boy), hence, missing the core objective of the academic system. It is true the relationship with books at some point is grossly affiliated with senses.These senses therefore tend to aid a learner in developing the positive relationship with the books; a relationship that primarily originates from the sensual attraction between the teacher and the student.