The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

Many of us are very family oriented and believe that family should always be present in our life no matter what do in life. While some of us feel that, our desire is worth more important than family due to the lack of communication with family members. In the “Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez recalls some of the difficulties he had at a young age, which was balancing his life academically and practicing the Mexican traditions. His desire was more important to him than his family because communication with his family was not as strong as before when he began to get more involved in his education, which separates him from his family mentally and physically.

In his essay, “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez informs readers that he was a scholarship boy throughout his educational career. He uses his own personal experiences, as well as Richard Hoggart’s definition of the “scholarship boy,” to describe himself as someone who constantly struggles with balancing his life between family and education, and ends up on the side of education. In recognizing himself as a “scholarship boy,” he shows that he has gained what sociologist C. Wright Mills terms the “sociological imagination,” which “enables its possessor to understand the larger

To fully comprehend a work you cannot just read it. You must read it, analyze it, question it, and even then question what you are questioning. In Richard Rodriguez’s The Achievement of Desire we are presented with a young Richard Rodriguez and follow him from the start of his education until he is an adult finally having reached his goals. In reference to the way he reads for the majority of his education, it can be said he reads going with the grain, while he reads a large volume of books, the quality of his reading is lacking.

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).

The primary aim of English 1101 is to prepare the student to effectively communicate, and identify or create new knowledge in various spheres of life. English 1101 assisted me to have control over the writing conventions through extensive writing practice or reading, guided by evaluations and feedbacks from my course instructor. The course contains several topics namely; effective writing processes, rhetorical organizations methods, academic writing formats and styles, critical reading skills, researching, and citing the researched sources.

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.

In Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire,” he compares himself to author Richard Hoggart’s “scholarship boy,” the type of student anyone can become. The “scholarship boy” is “anxious and eager to learn,” but is overbearing in his ways of learning and conveying knowledge (Rodriguez 534). Born as a son of two Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez quickly detached his life at school from his life at home. Hoggart helped Rodriguez to see near the end of his education exactly how harmful this type of lifestyle would become for Rodriguez’s learning. In my own experience, and specifically in my four years of high school, I tried my best to avoid being a “scholarship boy,” because that would prove detrimental to myself in relationships, my education, and my health and wholeness.

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”.

In literary education, from childhood to maturity, individuals are taught how to write not to improve themselves as critical thinkers, but to fulfill the requirements given to them in a prompt. Whether to analyze or argue, this form of writing has led to a cease of literary improvement in students today, making many question the effectiveness of writing classes. Mike Bunns, in his article “To Read like a Writer”, explores this topic and stresses the necessity for young readers to critically examine the author’s choices in order to improve their own pieces of work. Bunns effectively argues to his audience of college students that improved comprehension comes from focusing on the rhetorical choices authors decide to make in their compositions by tying personal narratives with repetitive questioning throughout his article.

In my English 1010 class, I have learned to do a number of things through writing essays. I have written a Literacy Narrative, a Discourse Community Analysis, and a Writing Research essay. Firstly, I have learned to identify how an author’s purpose, audience, genre, and context determine effective writing. The purpose of the literacy narrative was to help me understand myself better as a writer (Jones 1). My teacher was the intended audience of the narrative. The genre of the narrative was non-fiction by cause of it being about my experience as a writer. The context of writing made my writing more interesting and more effective. Knowing those elements helps you to compose writing that is more effective due to you needing to know what you need to write about and who is receiving your writing. I displayed these skills by going into detail about my experiences with reading and writing through my life. As shown in the following sentence from my literacy narrative I shared how fun and exciting it was when my second-grade class received the opportunity to write a book, A Book of Future Astronauts, “Everyone in the class was truly excited to be writing our own book,” (Writing is Good).

Gary Soto, who among many things was a Mexican-American poet, many times wrote about what he knew best: his life. Growing up as a Chicano in America in the 50s and 60s, Soto worked in fields as a laborer from a young age. It is evident that coming from a Hispanic working class family greatly influenced his poem “Ambition”. As he is known for, Soto's poem is filled with imagery of everyday life, while harping on important details and themes of things that he may have seen around him., but in this instance, there was a bit of confusion. To begin with, the poem “Ambition” starts off with the line "For years our ambition was to eat/Chicken"(1-2). Without further analysis, at this point the reader is most likely confused, much like I was. Chicken? How could eating be one's goal, one's aspiration in life? The word ambition is usually associated with lofty goals. It would not seem out of place to say that one's ambition was to become a doctor or to make a better life for oneself. So the speaker in the poem could not truly believe that all that he wanted in life was to eat chicken. The outlandishness of this statement seems to be the speaker pointing huge arrows towards places in the poem that invoke deeper meaning to

In Rodriguez’s essay, The Achievement of Desire, Rodriguez illustrates the characteristics of an automaton, thus confirming Freire’s views regarding the banking concept. Despite his classification as a "scholarship boy", Rodriguez lacked his own point of view and confidence, which led him to be dominated by his teachers and his books. In the eyes of Paulo Frerie, Rodriguez would be considered a receptacle. He was filled not only with his teacher’s information, but also with knowledge obtained from his reading of "important" books. Rodriguez is a classic student of the banking system.

Our education system is perhaps one of the most complex institutions in the United States. Students are taught to be their most authentic selves but yet are told to think a certain way. In reality, students really don’t have the freedom to be their genuine identity. Our society tells us that a typical student speaks the language, excels in all areas of study, and loves to read. Children who do not fit this mold are often at a disadvantage and do not attain the same acceptance. In the essay, “Achievement of Desire” Richard Rodriguez was a first generation immigrant from Mexico. His parents spoke little English, and had no education. Automatically, his family is an outcast. Throughout Rodriguez’s schooling career he learned to fit the perfect mold of the “typical” American student. He finds himself to be in an internal struggle between social versus family isolation, authenticity and finding his place in the American society.

Proficient writing is an essential skill in all aspects of academic and professional achievement. English 101, Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric, provided the framework to good writing, teaching me composition and rhetoric fundamentals, polishing up my grammar and style, and expressing a clear message. English 102, Composition, Rhetoric, and Research, continued to build on the skills I learned in English 101, focusing on the subject matter research process and employing various rhetorical and literary devices to better express a clear message to the reader. The course also improved my critical thinking capacity, allowing me to culturally evaluate my target audience, present logically flowing arguments using appropriate language and structure, and critically reviewing my writing projects for content and expression. Every writer inherently knows there’s always room to improve and I hold fast to this mindset in all academic, professional, and personal writing projects. English 102 has both challenged and inspired me to grow into a much better writer than before I began the class, providing the necessary skills to be not just a good writer, but a great writer.

Over the past month, we have been studying the concept of reading and writing in different communities. To assess this, we have read two different texts. Richard Rodriguez’s the achievement of desire”, from his autobiography “Hunger of Memory”; and Lucille McCarthy’s “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum” from “Research in the Teaching of English”. Both answer key questions regarding what it takes to become a great reader and writer, however, from the reading that I have done, each one only answers one part of the question. Rodriguez’s main focus is in the aspect of reading, whereas McCarthy mainly focuses on the writing portion. Both do a decent job of analyzing and putting forth a view of how they believe a person can best perform in these environments. This then allows us to use their concepts and create our own version, based on their points of view. But why should we care? Most people at this level of academia will have developed a system of writing that works for them, and will have a difficult time breaking from it if they’re process doesn’t meet the criteria that Rodriguez, and McCarthy put forth. The reason it’s so important is because of implications these ideas have. Both authors put forth concepts that are indirectly related to one another and that are highly beneficial to all who will apply them. They will force you to conform to new environments in order to succeed, this in turn will make you more