Essay 1: Paul Logan
In the story “Zero,” Paul Logan is a student who really struggled throughout his academic life by showing failure and having a 0.0 G.P.A. Logan use to be an A student and then became an C student. He could not take the stress of keeping up with the grades and eventually dropped out of college. Logan worked at grocery store pushing carts, and while he was doing his job he came to a realization when he saw his classmates from high school. His classmates made him feel horrible about himself because they wondered how did he ended up working at a grocery store. Logan felt so embarrassed when he met with his classmates that it was time start succeed. During the fall, he attend a local community college and attend all classes
The World Fair of 1933 brought promise of new hope and pride for the representation of Chicago, America. As Daniel Burnham built and protected America’s image through the pristine face of the fair, underlying corruption and social pollution concealed themselves beneath Chicago’s newly artificial perfection. Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City meshes two vastly different stories within 19th century America and creates a symbolic narrative about the maturing of early Chicago.
Cedric is an unusual student to walk the halls of Ballou High. Unlike most of his peers, he actually wants to make something of himself; he does his homework, he studies and he works on extra credit projects. The majority of the kids at Ballou barely come to class, much less make any attempt at learning. Since this is the overall attitude of the school, Cedric must exercise social mobility and do whatever he can to better himself as an individual. He is not necessarily competing against the students at Ballou (because he by far surpasses them), but he is in competition with all the other students from better schools throughout the area. During the summer that Cedric spends at MIT, he is truly awakened to the fact that he was extremely far behind the other students from urban areas. The director of the program expresses his frustration with the MIT program- "When he first arrived... He had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America-... He saw that he had been drea...
In The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, Robbins explores the correlation between perfectionism and academic prowess. Over the course of one year she follows the lives of AP Frank, Julie, C.J., Sam, Stealth, Audrey and others as they transition through high school and into college. These students, as Robbins showcases, epitomize what is wrong with America’s Educational System. Robbins explores the impact of the intricacies produced by America’s scholastic whirlwind on students as expressed by her research participants. Robbins masterfully crafts an informative and emotional roadmap that intertwines topics such as No Child Left Behind, College Board’s SAT, College Rankings, Ultra Competitive Parents, Cheating and Emotional and Medical Distress from a student’s perspective. The author presents each issue by presenting occurrences f...
In the Woods are related to each other through various similarities. Both describe a woman with despair and misery. Kate Chopin had experienced the same situation that was told in the short story. They also portray a situation that women go through and in many cases that they never get out of. Through the metaphor of color and the use of literary technique and images portrayed a sense of elation and a subtle depression.
Students encounter many complications during their school career. Some students are smart, but just don’t apply themselves, or have similar hardships that are going on in their lives. These can be fixed if one can find motivation and confidence. In the story “Zero,” Paul Logan coasts through high school and college. Logan doesn’t know the tools to succeed in school, which causes his grades to fall. In the story “The Jacket,” Gary Soto explains how the way one dresses can influences how they feel about themself. Which in this case he gets an ugly jacket; which causes him to be depressed and his grades to fall. Albeit Logan and Soto went through similar hardships, they both succeed with motivation and confidence.
He later worked at Sam’s Club; pushing carts and became a fulltime worker. As he was working he saw his old classmates from high school. They were on their way to being successful, while Logan was pushing carts at Sam’s Club. This made him realize that he didn’t want to push carts but to be successful in life. Logan states “Coasting wasn’t going to carry me any further. Neither would CD’s, the parties, or the brand name sneakers, I’d so valued in high school. By pursuing them and nothing else, I’d closed doors in my life” (“Zero” 51). Most students can relate because as teenagers we tend to not care for school but rather care for what we are wearing and what’s going on in social media. We also like to party and hang out with friends rather than to study for classes. I can relate to this because in high school I would just coast through school and not care for my grades. I would hang out with my friends and do stuff until its really late. I wouldn’t do well in class because I was too busy doing stuff with my friends. My mother always dislikes what I would do. She would always get furious when the report card would come because she knew I would have bad grades. She would tell me to do well in school and that would make her proud. The second semester of my sophomore year I would try to get better grades to make my mom proud because It would hurt her feeling when I get terrible grades. So, I made a plan and set
In the reading “Zero,” Paul Logan is a student who struggled throughout his academic life by being a failure and having a 0.0 GPA. Logan was an A student and he eventually became a C student in his last years. He got disappointed and dropped out of college. Logan worked at Sam’s Club, and while working he had a moment of realization when he met his classmates from high school. They made him feel bad because they were wondering about how he ended up working at Sam’s Club. He decided that he must start something and succeed. The following fall, after collecting money, he started in a local community college and attended all classes. Clearly, Logan thought it through and made his failure a lesson or a beginning of success.
Kleinfeld tries to categorize Chris McCandless as a hero, dumb jerk, or soul searcher. She uses pathos as well as blatantly stating her opinion to achieve her goal. In Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild we see many aspects of Chris McCandless that both support and contradicts these categorizations given by Kleinfeld. Jon Krakauer shows us every aspect of Chris McCandless’s journey as well as his life before, by doing this Krakauer shows Chris McCandless is not just one category, he is not any category at all. Kleinfeld’s condescending tone expresses the lack of heroism she sees in McCandless. (Adjust thesis to fit new purpose).
"She knew that she would when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death, the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely"(Chopin 15). When a couple gets married the vows state until death do they part, but Mr. and Mrs. Mallard took those vows literally. Mrs. Mallard and her husband's marriage seemed to have more problems than others. In Kate Chopin's essay "Story of an Hour", the author introduces several symbolic references to nature to illustrate Mrs. Mallard's mixed emotions in regards to her husband's unexpected death.
At the heart of every great story, there is a great storyteller. Denis Lehane is one of these great storytellers. In this 2001 novel Mystic River, he recounts the story of three young boys after a horrific event (). The consequences of that terrible incident change the lives of the three characters Jimmy, Dave and Sean forever. Many of the characters in the novel fall into a cycle of dumb violence and revenge. Take Jimmy as an example. First, he kills a character by the name of Just Ray and then he kills his childhood friend Dave for reasons he believed were just. Dave himself kills a pedophile, because he thought it was the right thing to do. In Mystic River, Lehane demonstrates through the actions of the characters that revenge, often claimed
Logan is motivated by many factors. One type of motivation that Logan feels is extrinsic motivation, which is motivation created by external factors. An example of this is if he does his homework, he knows there will be a reward such as getting a good grade. If Logan did not care about his grades in school, then he would not do his homework at all. Another reward that Logan gets is baseball cards. Logan loves to collect baseball cards, so to motivate him to do his homework, Logan carries a baseball chart around from class to class. If he turns in his homework on time his teacher will add another baseball card to his chart. When one of his charts are full he adds it into his collection
Society is a result of our interactions, and society guides our interactions. This all stems from social construction. Social construction conveys values, ideas and traditions. These values, ideals and traditions are created and become traditions that are then passed on. These traditions then come to be perceived as natural rather than cultural, which is often how media will display it and society unknowingly accepts.
Everybody has a dawn of realization at some point in their life, whether that be from finally understanding a math problem that you have been struggling with, or finally grasping how simple it is to ride a bike. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” does just this with our main character Mrs. Mallard, but I wonder what she finally understands?
The narrative structure in Slaughterhouse-Five is nonlinear. One of the greatest distinctive and unique aspects of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is the structure to which it is written. All through the novel, Billy Pilgrim journeys irrepressibly to non-chronological moments of his life, or as Vonnegut verbalizes, “paying random visits to all events in between.” (23). The structure of the novel is eccentric and does not actually have a well-defined beginning, middle, and end in the progression of the narrative. There is continuous movement amongst the future, past, and present in erratic ways. Vonnegut’s narrative consist of rapid brief paragraphs which do not follow a straight timeline, but as an alternative jolts forward and backward
The short story ‘The Story of an Hour’, by Kate Chopin (1894), is interesting for a number of reasons. Perhaps chief among these is the strong feminist themes that resonate from the story, which are particularly striking given that it was published at the end of the 19th century, long before feminism had become a commonplace in Academia or mainstream intellectual life. This paper will argue for a strong feminist reading of the story, one that attempts to do justice to its subtle complexities and possible ambiguities. The thesis that lies behind the reading is that Chopin was anticipating a line of thought that developed fully only much later, namely that marriage, and traditional man-woman romantic relationships more generally, can be (and perhaps ought to be) understood as a kind of slavery.