Why is Family Important so Important

Alice Elliott Dark’s In the Gloaming, represents how much family time is important to one’s heart. “…caregiving must be a way of life. This does not mean that caregiving is all of life.” Alice shows the opposite of good family time to hint at the reader of what is really going on behind the scenes. The author “pulls the reader directly into the world of caregiving by dramatizing the meaning of reciprocal human relationships. It also highlights some of the central themes of this book- that there is a difference between caring as sentiment and caring as practice, that caring is crucial to the human community, and that it entails skills that can be taught and learned.” The main character, Laird, was a normal teenager who liked to have fun and hang out with his friends. Laird and his parents did not have the closest relationship but they would still talk about certain things. Everything was turned upside down for Laird, his parents and somewhat for his sister as well. He became very sick with an unnamed illness. Laird never wanted to talk to his parents about the illness because he was embarrassed.

During Douglas Eisner’s Critical Thinking and Literature class at a Community College, he taught and discussed Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. His students reacted in a way he had never thought about. They insisted he ---was trying to teach them about “a world without God.” Three students also argued that they were offended by the “representations of homosexuality.” Another discussion started that the story was about AIDS and the issues that is has. Eisner realized there was “a large hole in [his] students’ education.” “It was only when we directly addressed the issue of sexuality, particularly homosexuality,...

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...do. One cannot pick a family to be with, but you have to make the best of it, and love them for who they are. “Friends come and go, but family is always there.” –Melissa Pate

Works Cited

Barnet, S., Burto, W., & Cain, W. (2006). In the Gloaming. In A. E. Dark, An Introduction to Literature (pp. 118-130). New York: Pearson Longman.

Eisner, D. (1999). Homophobia and the Demise of Multicultural Community: Strategies for Change in the Community College. Retrieved January 2014, from 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco, California: http://www.adfl.org/bulletin/V31N1/311054.htm

Gordon, S., Benner, P., & Noddings, N. (1996). Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practive, Ethics, and Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Guralnik, D. B. (1976). Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language. United States of America: The World Publishing Company.