Parvana – Text Response Essay
Even though Parvana is not allowed to attend school, she has many great “teachers” who help her learn about life and the world. Discuss.
Deborah Ellis’ novel Parvana gives the audience an awareness of how being literate is a struggle in Afghanistan but how experiences, society and the people that surround Parvana can educate one’s mind logically. The story exemplifies the experiences of daily life growing up as a female in a country embroiled with civil war. Parvana may be put in a position where she is unable to obtain a formal education however; this didn’t deter her from being educated about life lessons, maturity and morals. The author intends on sharing with the audience that even though there are many obstacles for Parvana she still
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Parvana’s father is a great teacher who is not only educated but teaches her how to read and write and the history of her country, “Parvana had grown up with his stories, which made her a very good student in history class.” (p.29) They discuss life before the Taliban, providing Parvana with hope for a better life. The geographical experiences people have, gives Parvana a small knowledge of places outside of war and Afghanistan. These people teach her as she works, “Sometimes they told her of the beautiful mountains or the field of opium poppies blooming into flower, or the orchards heavy with fruit.” (p. 134) Shauzia, Parvana’s friend through the novel, teaches her about geography and shows Parvana new places when they chat together, “’In Pakistan, I head down to the Arabian Sea, get on a boat, and go to France!’” Parvana has exceptional teachers around her who may not have a degree or the occupation of a teacher but, go on to teach her things about life and the geographical landscape that she has never
In the article titled “Pashtana’s Lesson” by Beth Murphy, she records the story of a 15 year-old Afghani girl who has a fiery passion for acquiring knowledge and pursuing education, but old traditions oppress her devotion to study. Pashtana is in the 7th grade at an all girls school which has been rejected by the elders in their community, asked to be torn down, or turned into an all boys school. Her mother strongly enforces studies on her children because she never went to school herself and she doesn’t want her children to end up blind to things in the world like her. In order to support her mother and three younger siblings financially, Pashtana is being forced by her uncle and father to marry her first cousin which is not uncommon, the
In the second last paragraph of this essay, Alexie uses the parallel structure of “I read…” to emphasize his passion in reading and his strong determination to pursue his purpose of saving his life as an Indian who is always challenged by stereotypes. The last paragraph repeats “write poetry, short stories, or novels” for four times in different scenarios, including Alexie himself has never been taught of how to “write poetry, short stories, or novels”, and he is now teaching the Indian kids “writing poetry, short stories, or novels”. Alexie employs this repetition to highlight the fact that reading and writing still play essential roles in the Indian life, and there are always Indian people who are interested in learning about reading and write just like him. The final sentences in the last two paragraphs are only slightly different. Alexie ends the second last paragraph of this essay with his ultimate goal after stating his experience as a passionate reader in the beginning.
Literacy gives courage and provides a positive influence in times of crisis.
Gioia identifies all that is at stake in a world where reading is obsolete in his essay On the Importance of Reading. He paints imagery to show the comparisons of readers and non readers as well as the affects literacy and illiteracy have on the world. Gioia asserts his opinions on why reading is losing the battle of popularity. According to Gioia a person who reads is civic-minded, active, empathic, and imaginative. Gioia expresses the opposite benefits are true of illiterate or semi literate people they lead passive lives, are less likely to volunteer, and less imaginative. Among all of these benefits of reading Gioia identifies, he writes in depth about empathy gained through reading. I also feel one of the greatest benefits of reading
He is able to capture the realness of the time and setting through his words, and write for a purpose. As a result, it can be said that he uses this work of historical fiction less as a theatrical stage and more as a platform to introduce the audience to the inhumaneness of Afghanistan. He not only incorporates the Taliban’s grueling “beard lookout men,” who patrol the roads in their fancy Toyota trucks in hopes of finding “a smooth-shaven face to bloody,” but he also displays the horrific and bloodcurdling abuse of women that exists at the hands’ of men and the feelings of great despair and pain that these women face as a result. Living in a state of unbearable fear of the next beating, the next detonating bomb, and the next brutal attempt of the Taliban, the lives of these characters feel almost too real to not be true. Resultantly, the reader is left to wonder whether or not this added literary dimension of realness is actually an introspective study of individuals that Hosseini has long
Being a culture under pressure from both sides of the contact zone, there needs to be passion and emotion or else the culture might disappear into history. Anzaldua’s text makes great use of passion and emotion while merging the ideas of multiple cultures together through the tough experiences in her life. Autoethnographic texts give perspective to outsiders on how a culture functions from the inside point of view. Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” excellently portrays her culture’s plight and creates a fiery passionate entrance for her culture in their uprising through the contact zone.
...templates for strong and weak western narratives of other places but lacks literary rigor. Even so, both are equally important for the education of young people in a larger, global setting with diverse experiences and cultures trying to understand one another. She draws attention to voice appropriation, authorial national ideological agendas, and the Americanized slant in representations of the non-west by westerners. The presence of Americanized interpretation and editing can cause a crooked depiction of the other, ultimately telling us more about ourselves than about them.
In this discussion between Bold Talent and Spring Moon we see the consequences females might undergo from being educated. Spring Moon was afraid of what her family might say, what boys would laugh at her, and of the teacher would resign because he wouldn’t teach a girl. All these problems just from teaching a human to read and write. However most females were not afraid of the consequences they might suffer.
• AW’s work is deeply rooted in oral tradition; in the passing on of stories from generation to generation in the language of the people. To AW the language had a great importance. She uses the “Slave language”, which by others is seen as “not correct language”, but this is because of the effect she wants the reader to understand.
Our perception about the world change as we grow up and experience the reality of life. This is the necessary and universal experience that we all must undergo to face the world successfully. The protagonists in James Joyce’s “Araby” and Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls experience a common initiation of how different the world is, compared to how they would like to see. The reader is given a glance into the lives of two adolescents. The protagonists in both stories are of the growing age and their perceptions about the world change. These changes contradict with their past perceptions and leads life in a different direction. Both Joyce and Munro unfold series of bizarre life thrilling experience from the daily life of the protagonists to create the universal lesson of how different the world is, compare to how they would like to see. But the way, this necessary and universal lesson learn differs with each protagonist. The boy’s initiation in “Araby” comes, when the girl (Mangan’s sister) come in his life. After his encounter with her his life completely change forever and he wants to be his own man. The initiation of the Young girl in “Boys and Girls” comes, after watching the shooting of horse “Mack” and letting “Flora” the other horse, out of the gate. Letting Flora free is indeed the protagonist’s way of watching world. After watching shooting of “Mack” she does not want “Flora” to face the same miserable death like “Mack”. She thinks letting Flora free save Flora from shooting.
When people read, they are taken to another person’s world and forced to see things through a new lens. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid attempted to use the feelings already inside the reader to create the world. In “Enduring Love of the Second Person,” Hamid writes “to try and show, after the terror attacks of 9/11, how feelings already present inside a reader – fear, anger, suspicion, loyalty- could color a narrative so that the reader, as much as or even more than the writer, is deciding what is really going on.” He wants to use the second person to pull the feeling already in ourselves into the material that is used to make the set for The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Within every story or poem, there is always an interpretation made by the reader, whether right or wrong. In doing so, one must thoughtfully analyze all aspects of the story in order to make the most accurate assessment based on the literary elements the author has used. Compared and contrasted within the two short stories, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, and John Updike’s “A&P,” the literary elements character and theme are made evident. These two elements are prominent in each of the differing stories yet similarities are found through each by studying the elements. The girls’ innocence and naivety as characters act as passages to show something superior, oppression in society shown towards women that is not equally shown towards men.
Teachers help us expand and open our mind by giving us skills throughout students’ early life to help students when they are older. By learning information from teachers, students become better people, in a couple of ways. Besides inquiring knowledge from their teachers, students learn to work with one another, open their mind to other peoples’ thoughts and ideas, respect one another, and learn different techniques for life’s issues.
In the Third and Final Continent, Jhumpa Lahiri uses her own experiences of being from an immigrant family to illustrate to her readers how heritage, cultural influences and adaptation play a major role in finding your true identity. The Third and Final Continent is the ninth narration in a collection of stories called the Interpreter of Maladies. In this story, it discusses themes such as marriage, family, society, language and identity. In this story, we focus on an East Asian man of Bengali descent who wants to have a better future for himself so he leaves India and travels to London, England to pursue a higher education. His pursuit for higher education takes place on three different continents. In India, he feels safe in his home country and welcomed, but when he travels abroad he starts to have fear and anxiety. Through his narrations, we learn how he adapts to the European and American and through these experiences he learns to assimilate and to adapt to the new culture he travels to.
Teachers serve as the guiding force in a student’s life. They are responsible for molding a student’s personality and shaping his/her mental orientation. Teachers deeply impact our lives and direct the course of our future. One cannot deny the influence of teachers in one’s life. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, till a certain age, out life revolves around our teachers. They are our constant companions, until we grow old enough to come out of their shadow and move ahead on our own.