Summary of James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips
James Hilton’s novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips is the story of an English schoolmaster who dedicated his entire adult life teaching young boys. He was a somewhat shy person. Nevertheless he was a competent school teacher, professional and attractive in many different ways. Although his first teaching experience was not successful, he was determined to become a good schoolmaster. After coming to Brookfield, he began to warm up to his students. But more important he brought discipline to his school which is the requirement for good teaching—something he did not achieve while teaching at Melbery.
After teaching 25 years at Brookfield, Chips was still unmarried. Everyone thought that he would never get married because he had passed the usual marrying age. But, he did marry and it happened under unusual conditions. He went on a trip to the Lake district of England and there, he met his future wife, Katherine Bridges. During the trip, he was climbing a steep hill when he saw a woman from far waving at someone down below. The woman was standing on a dangerous-looking ledge and appeared to be asking for help. Chips thought that she needed to be rescued and proceeded to help her. Instead of helping her, he hurt his ankle, and in the end, she ended up helping Chips. Within weeks after their first meeting, they fell in love with each other and before the end of summer, they got married.
Katherine deeply loved Chips and he loved her in return. Within a short time, the charming Katherine turned Mr. chips into an good-natured gentleman who was adored by his students. He was changed by the power of love. Chips became a kind, congenial, friendly individual to everyone—so much so that he became the most beloved teacher at Brookfield. Full of enthusiasm, young English schoolmaster Mr. Chipping came to teach at Brookfield in 1870. It was a time when dignity and a kindness of spirit still existed, and the dedicated new schoolmaster expressed these beliefs to his disorderly students. Nicknamed Mr. Chips, this gentle and caring man helped shape the lives of generation after generation of boys. He became a legend at Brookfield, as continuing as the institution itself. And sad but grateful faces told the story when the time came for the students at Brookfield to bid their final goodbye to Mr. Chips.
This novel Goodbye, Mr...
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...ool’s war dead; for everyone else they are just names, but for Chips, each name has a face attached. After the War the retireds, after 42 years teaching Roman History and Latin at Brookfield.
Mr. Chips is the living personification of institutional memory. The classes of boys, the teachers and headmasters, even the subjects and teaching methods, come and go, but Chips has remained throughout. He “still had those ideas of dignity and generosity that a frantic world was forgetting.” He embodies the pre-War world and its values. In the very middle of an era that was witnessing an unregulated attack on all of the West’s institutions and values, Hilton created Mr. Chips, it represent the conservative ideal—providing a bridge of memory to all that is beautiful and good and decent in our past, just in case, in our zeal to create a perfect world, we forget the qualities and accomplishments which give us the pretty good world in which we live.
This book is unabashedly sentimental. I appreciate the sensitivity non-political way in which they make the most important of political points: even as we move forward we must always preserve those things and ideas of value in our past.
Heritage is one of the most important factors that represents where a person came from. In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, this short story characterizes not only the symbolism of heritage, but also separates the difference between what heritage really means and what it may be portrayed as. Throughout the story, it reveals an African-American family living in small home and struggling financially. Dee is a well-educated woman who struggles to understand her family's heritage because she is embarrassed of her mother and sister, Mama and Maggie. Unlike Dee, Mama and Maggie do not have an education, but they understand and appreciate their family's background. In “Everyday Use,” the quilts, handicrafts, and Dee’s transformation helps the reader interpret that Walker exposed symbolism of heritage in two distinctive point of views.
I read the book Killing Mr. Griffin, by Lois Duncan. There was an English teacher, Mr. Griffin, which nobody liked. He was a tough teacher, and didn’t give anyone an A. Not even the smartest student, Susan McConnell. They disliked him so much that they wanted to try and scare him by kidnapping him.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam Books, 1985.
...t create ourselves. That we owe what we are to the communities that helped form us”(Bellah et. al., P. 295). We have a long history in this country of others who gave and sacrificed so much so we could have our present. We must understand that life is to be shared, it is not a race whose only “goal is to he foremost” (Bellah et. al., P. 296). It is to be lived. We must be committed to those we love, and to our communities. Maybe the longing for nostalgia in this country can help to return to a time when family, friends, community, church and more were important and we all knew we were part of something greater than ourselves. We must however not live in the past, we must use the past to build and focus on the future.
The trip to Brooklyn didn’t turn out the way I expected this morning. I went back to Brooklyn looking for the life I had left when I went to college. My father, the Judge Albert Cohn of the New York State Supreme Court always wanted me to go away and find a life outside of Brooklyn. It meant a lot to him to have his only child to go out of Brooklyn and continue what he called his judge’s legacy. However, I always miss what I had left. Life for me has been a struggle since I became an aide for Senator Joseph McCarthy. I’m an American patriot and my job those days was to prove to the country that the State Department was full of communist infiltrators, but the Senator and I had become what the Communists and Liberals call "discredited." The Senator influence in the country’s politics had decline but my influence is still strong. I didn’t fade away as he did. I always wanted to walk the streets that I walked when I was a child one more time to reassure myself that the struggle had been worth it. I yearn when I’m alone to feel again the joy I felt when I walked by the big houses of Rugby Road on my way home after school. Walking those streets one more time, I wanted to feel Brooklyn the way it felt to me then. Like a magical kingdom. Like the Jews in the promise land after wandering in the desert for forty years. Time seems to stretch endlessly on those days; ten minutes felt more as an hour and summer felt like the whole year. Nevertheless, this time, it hadn’t worked out that way to me. The magic feeling that felt as a boy looking at those houses from the sidewalk was no longer there. It seems that my clock had stared working right again. A minute was a minute and an hour was sixty minutes as it was everywhere else. Tick, tick, tick... tick. I couldn’t stretch time again or at least not today.
The idea of heritage is very different from one person to another. The story of “Everyday Use” shows a dynamic picture of two sisters that see their family history and upbringing nearly opposite points of view. The quilts become the catalyst for a cultural battle between Dee’s (Wangero) new “enlightened” lifestyle and Maggie’s contentment with her upbringing.
Cuba is by far the largest in the chain of island, and constitutes one of the four islands of the Greater Antilles. The long and narrow island runs from northwest to southeast and is—777 miles long and, 119 miles across its widest point and 19 miles at the narrowest. Cuba’s geography consists of one-fourth mountainous terrain. The Sierra Maestra is the most rugged landscape. It stretches roughly 150 miles along the southeastern coast and ranges the island’s highest elevations—6,476 feet. The Cordillera located far west stretches from southwest to northeast for 110 miles, with huge shaped vegetation-clad hillocks called mogotes interrupt central-western
... More lives have been lost in the 21st century then in any century before; therefore foreshadowing that in the years to come we probably should not be so hopeful for real peace. Maybe those heart broken mothers an fathers should not expect to see their children’s deaths as useful. Maybe those orphaned babies should not be given false hope that one day they will be able to go to school without hearing gun shots as if birds were chirping.
The culture in Cuba is diversified by the lingua franca, religions, ethnicity, globalization, conflicts, and many more things. People in 1791 spoke french during the haitian revolution, but that has since died out as well as the languages the indigenous people spoke. Most all cubans now speak only spanish. During the neocolonial republic,
Lebow, Richard Ned. "The Future of Memory." American Academy of Political and Social 617 (2008): 25-41. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
This book teaches the importance of self-expression and independence. If we did not have these necessities, then life would be like those in this novel. Empty, redundant, and fearful of what is going on. The quotes above show how different life can be without our basic freedoms. This novel was very interesting and it shows, no matter how dismal a situation is, there is always a way out if you never give up, even if you have to do it alone.
Learning and memory are two topics that have held the attention of researchers for centuries. This is most likely due to the fact that they are integral to our survival, yet are unconscious processes that we take for granted every day.
Atwood uses many emotional words and phrases to persuade her audience, and achieve her purpose. Atwood uses words and phrases that create emotions such as anger, but more importantly she creates a sense of reminiscing and missing the “good-ole-days” which is the emotion she uses to motivate her audience to take a stand and make a change for America. Atwood starts off her letter saying, “I’m no longer sure who you are… I thought I knew you” (Atwood). These statements make the readers sad as they come to the realization that America is changing since their childhood, which is what they consider, the good ole days. Atwood continues by listing some of her favorite memories from her childhood such as “the music [she] sang and danced to: the Andrew Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters, Elvis” (Atwood). This makes America seem like it is “a ton of fun” (Atwood). The list of Atwood’s favorite music and other memories serves as pathos, because it makes people miss the way America used to be, and it also makes them mad about how America is now. The list causes the readers to realize how corrupt and different todays music, movies, books, and television shows are, which makes the reader sad about how much times are changing and this causes them to want to act so that today 's generation can know an America that is similar to the America that they have previously known. When describing America today Atwood describes her “embarrassment” (Atwood) for the country, she describes how the government is “gutting the Constitution” (Atwood) and “torching the American economy”(Atwood), she describes how the American people are “easily frightened”(Atwood) because of all of the new policies and changes in current day America. Americans are very prideful of their country so when Atwood describes feeling of embarrassment for America,
Body image has a lot to do with the reasons why teenage girls want to get plastic surgery. One of the main reasons is because teenage girls are exposed to the media. The media puts out certain images of certain people on how these teenage girls should look. Therefore, since teenage girls are always exposed to these images, they except to look like these high fashioned super model or even A-list celebrities such as: Beyoncé, Rihanna, or Kim Kardashian-West. Teenage girls have to understand that their bodies are built differently from the individuals listed above. Also, they have to realize these celebrities are in different circumstances than them. If these individuals weren’t
Advertisement for cosmetic surgery are everywhere from the front page on the magazine by the block to the television commercials. Surgery has been deeply impact to younger groups of kids. It has become at table discussion at dinner nowadays. A young girl got a nose job, rhinoplasty to make more symmetrical. She didn’t think she was ugly she just wanted her face to be proportional. The summer after school one of her friends got one. Girls at her praised her for her new nose. Everyone was so much impressed they booked an appointment for themselves. “ Magazine have pushed the envelope on what it means to be beautiful and surgery is a nowadays way to deal with body issues” Perloff para 12). Cosmetic surgery has become an epidemic (Fresh Faces para.22). There is nothing wrong getting a Botox, or breast augmentation but there are some dangerous procedures. Everyone has a heard at least one story of a cosmetic surgery fail. Recently Instagram has been flooded with the news of a girl, Sarah Tehar getting multiple of surgery to look like Angelina Jolie. Many can say it is an epic fail. She has went under the knife fifty times to like her idol , Angelina Jolie. Although gaining popularity on Instagram, she been nicknamed “zombie”. Cosmetic procedure are not a bad thing at all, the problem is use to boost self-esteem(Fresh