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"For years I never spoke to anyone about it. Never mentioned a thing to my parents or teachers or my classmates"(Rodriguez 623). 1 shiver as I read it-the most powerful sentence I have ever come across. Scared, confused and resentful, I slam the book shut. Silence confronts me. Not a whisper, not a murmur-I hear nothing. I am alone. The donn room is too dark, the single lamp too dim. Anxious and frightened I flop onto the bed and look out at the night sky. Not a star is to be seen-Just infinite dark space. My pulse quickens. Suddenly the room is too hot-too small. I feel claustrophobic. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing it to go away. It won't. My palms become sweaty and I feel nauseous. I kick my legs in the air, angrily lashing out at the haunting memories. With every kick the anger builds up, until tears of hopelessness and frustration roll down my cheeks onto the pillow. I can't take it anymore, and I scream, "Aaaaahhhh!" It's only an essay I remind myself. But that is exactly the problem-it has made me confront feelings that I have tried to ignore and had kept hidden for a very long time. I close my eyes and the memories flood my head, threatening to haunt me.
I am the "scholarship boy" to a certain limit (Rodriguez 622). 1 am an excellent student. Always successful, always confident. Needing to be the best. I study and read to succeed-to get a report card with nothing but A's. I don't study to learn. I am a good student and yet at the same time, a bad one. I read, ace an exam, and then forget about it, for my sole purpose is to succeed and get ahead. But this does not make me bookish- merely ambitious and overzealous for success. "Education is the only way for you to succeed. Take advantage of every opportunity you get," my...
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.... It makes me feel ungrateful that my parents love me and miss me so much, yet I cannot fully return that. It took Rodriguez a lifetime to come to terms with that. I wonder if I'll ever have the courage he had to took back. At this point I do feel like I have lost quite a bit of the cultural part of my childhood, but as yet I do not view it as a great loss. One thing is for sure; the essay forced me to confront my true feelings and has given me a way to express myself and a way to deal with issues I would have never otherwise faced. At this point I cannot say whether I will try and recover my lost culture. I just hope that university does not create an even greater barrier and distance between my family and me.
Works Cited
Rodriguez, Richard. "Achievement of Desire." Ways of Reading. Ed. Tony Perrietto and Joan E. Feinberg. Boston: Bantam Books, 1999. 620-639.
Technology has advanced immensely in the last 50 years. We are living in the digital age where technology and social media have become a part of our everyday routine. Majority of the nation owns a cell phone equipped with the ability to text. Since technology has become a very convenient way of communication, it has even managed to change human interactions and become apart of relationships. Texting limits relationships because its simply impossible to express emotion the way you can in person. Physically communicating and connecting with a person will never compare to texting or any social media.
In the essay “Achievement of Desire”, author Richard Rodriguez, describes the story of our common experience such as growing up, leaving home, receiving an education, and joining the world. As a child, Rodriguez lived the life of an average teenager raised in the stereotypical student coming from a working class family. With the exception, Rodriguez was always top of his class, and he always spent time reading books or studying rather than spending time with his family or friends. This approach makes Rodriguez stand out as an exceptional student, but with time he becomes an outsider at home and in school. Rodriguez describes himself as a “scholarship boy” meaning that because of the scholarships and grants that he was receiving to attend school; there was much more of an expectation for him to acquire the best grades and the highest scores. Rodriguez suggests that the common college student struggles the way he did because when a student begins college, they forget “the life [they] enjoyed
Every year, over nine million hikers and adventure seekers travel to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park making it the most visited national park in the United States. There are abundant reasons for this, but many popular reasons include over 150 hiking trails extending over 850 miles, a large portion of the Appalachian Trail, sightseeing, fishing, horseback riding, and bicycling. The park houses roughly ten thousand species of plants and animals with an estimated 90,000 undocumented species likely possible to be present. It is clear why there was a pressing interest in making all this land into a national park. My research was started by asking the question; how did the transformation of tourism due to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park affect surrounding cities such as Gatlinburg and Sevier County, and in return, its effect on the popularity of the park?
A smoke filled bar, jazz music in the background and a poet, young men with goat-tees, some high on marijuana, listening intently and mutters a common phrase in those days of the beat poets, ‘cool daddy-o, I really dig that cat’. Like a lot of the young writers and poets of the late 1940’s and 50’s, the crowded bars were filled with people who were in some way influenced by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Neil Cassady and William Burroughs, all of whom were at the core of the movement that has endured in one way or another to this day.
Abcarian, Richard. Literature: the Human Experience : Reading and Writing. : Bedford/Saint Martin's, 2012. Print.
Harmon, William, William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.
Rodriguez, Richard. "The Achievement of Desire." Petrosky, Anthony and David Bartholomae. Ways of Reading An Anthology for Writers. Boston ; New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. 516-532.
...s a classic that shows just how nasty adolescent girls can be under typical circumstances. Nearly every character at one point shows adolescent egocentrism. There are numerous lifespan concepts covered throughout the movie. Cady Herron is a perfect example of how tough high school can be for an adolescent girl going through multiple changes. She goes through a lot more than the typical adolescent girl. However, I think she shows how staying true to yourself is important when going through high school. The "plastics" do a great job of displaying different relationships with peers. They have strong relationships with each other, but struggle to form these relationships with anyone outside of their group. All in all, Mean Girls does a great job of displaying parenting styles, egocentrism, relationships with peers, self worth in relationships, and juvenile delinquency.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” This opening line of Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl truly depicts what the Beat generation was really like. He writes that his ‘generation was destroyed by madness’ meaning that the people of his generation became the victims of drug abuse, alcohol addiction, and violence. The Beat generation, or beatniks for short, consisted of some of Americas most celebrated writers including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy, and of course its leader, Jack Kerouac. The beats were a unique group of writers who strongly opposed social norm. They were very independent people who were known for breaking the law whenever they needed to. They were also drifters who spent most of their lives on the road, a motif which especially fascinated Jack Kerouac.
How often do we text? Text messaging is a very useful way to communicate; but, there are occasions where texting is unnecessary, for example in meetings, watching movies, interacting with family, and even in the shower. However, while texting can be overused, it can also help us get to know one another in easier and faster ways. In Natalie Y. Moore’s article “The Rule of Thumbs: Love in the Age of Texting," she explains how the use of texting it is slowly destroying the love between two people (Moore, 1). Although, some people might agree with Moore points of view, when she argues that texting is killing romance and it should be reserved for some notifications, such as “I’m running late;” others might disagree with this idea
Literature: Reading and Writing about the Human Experience. 7th ed. of the book. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
Step onto any college campus and take a look around. You will find clumps of students standing around in circles, phones in hand, typing away. What is it they are doing? Texting. Ever since the first text message was sent in 1993, the use of text messaging as a means of communication has spread like wild fire, especially amongst the adolescent generation. And with this new form of communication a new language has appeared; text-speak, the shortening of common words into abbreviations and acronyms (Drouin 49). While texting and the text-speak language seem to have been welcomed by many, what affect is this new technology having on the way we communicate? Is it possible that texting is negatively affecting our ability to use formal written communication, or is this idea just a myth perpetuated by negative media attention? And what changes has texting brought to the way we communicate person-to person? Are these changes positive, negative, or perhaps a mixture of both?
Bavarian gentians is a freeversepoem separated into 3 parts, an introductory couplet followed by two stanzas of 10 lines each. The title, Bavarian Gentians, references an uncommon (perhaps even rare)...
One of the things that cell phones have changed drastically is the way we communicate with others. With the birth of cell phones eventually came the invention of text messaging, or “texting.” Texting is sending simple messages over the air to another cell phone. People these days, especially the younger generation, find it much easier and quicker to text a person rather than call them or talk to them face to face. “Text messaging is the premier choice” says Jaletta Desmond, an expert on how cell phones have changed us over time. The reason why most of the younger generation prefers texting rather than talking is because they don’t value talking out loud one on one as much as the older generation does. Another reason why texting is the first choice for most people is that it gives a sense of privacy. No one can put their ear to the door and hear your texting conversation. In this day in age, we’ve made it nearly impossible to get in touch with others without having a cell phone on you. Cell phones have just become p...
The Beat Generation was one of the first groups of writers to break down the barriers of traditional literature and set a precedent for future writers with their writing style, their way of life, and by the messages they portrayed. They were the kids dressed in black, hanging out at coffee shops, reading their latest poetry. They protested wars, were drug users, and openly expressed homosexuality, as they expressed every aspect of their life candidly. But, the Beats are best known for their writing style. It was unique for that time to cast aside conventional structures of sentences and poetry. They used dashes instead of commas and periods; to write the way a person hears speech. Their poetry had a style of it’s own, unknown to any other groups of poets at the time; no rhyming, no structure, and non-conforming beauty.