The Santak’s Baby Patrick Jordan HDSF 2400 - Fall 2013 Milestone Paper #1 Nicholas Santak and his new wife, Molly Hogan, want to settle down and start having children. However they do not know if they are in the right stage of their life to begin being parents. Nick primarily works the night shift, patrolling the streets of North Saint Louis and when he is off duty he likes to spend a good portion of his time in his favorite South Saint Louis bar, drinking and smoking heavily with his high school cronies. Otherwise he is in the gym trying to keep in shape. Molly has recently been hired at a special needs school, teaching English and History.
The Blind Side is a truly inspiration story of one boy's journey to reach success. Michael Oher, an African-American teenager has endured a very rough upbringing. He never met his father and his mother is a drug addict. Michael has been in and out of foster homes and eventually lives on the streets until he is discovered by the loving Leigh Ann Tuohy. Leigh Ann sees Michael wandering in shorts and a t-shirt on a freezing cold night.
Big Mike has an amazing ability for any sport with a ball. As Big Mike is brought into the church school the coach notices this, but the admissions faculty pay no mind, simply by looking at his records they want nothing to do with him. At this point I do not think his race had anything to do with their decision because they had made a previous statement of another African American boy to whom they were going to accept. Once Big Mike gets accepted into the school, he quickly feels insecure, lost, alone. People look at him weird--he is a very tall and big guy.
Obviously Coach Carter cared enough about his players to realize that academics are more important than playing a sport. The parents of the players are all upset with Coach Carter because they believe that basketball is the only thing that is keeping their sons off the street and out of trouble. Later in the season, Coach Carter finds out that the players on the team have been slipping in their grades and he decides to suspend the games and lock up the gym. He watched over them as God would and made sure that they would make the right decisions in life, such as choosing education before athletics. He made them understand that basketball wasn’t going to get them through life, but having a good education would.
In the beginning of the movie, we come across a young Michael Oher who was in an extremely bad situation. Oher was homeless, sleeping on his friend's father's couch when he could. He had one pair of beat up shoes and two old shirts to wear. These, he carried around in a grocery bag. Michael had a 0.6 GPA and no prospects for the future.
Finding the information is about half of the problem. Overall, I learned that getting the best information and always keeping an open mind are very important things to be a good leader, and I plan to practice these at home, in my job and in school. Section Two: Your Personal Role Model / Leader When I was thinking about whom my role model is, the first person that came to my mind was my father. My father was a very hard working man, In India even as a young boy he would sell candy on the streets just to help my grandmother out. My father was one of eight kids and some nights they would have to go to sleep without any food.
To understand why James Baldwin wrote the novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, one must first know who the author is. James Baldwin was born on August 24th, 1924 in Harlem, New York. Baldwin was born to a single young mother, Emma Jones, who never told him the name of his biological father. About 3 years after his birth, his mother married David Baldwin, a factory worker as well as a local Baptist Minister in his community. The oldest of 9 children, Baldwin grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious step-father.
He never knew his father so he doesn’t have a good sense of his own identity, he makes poor decisions in raising his son’s by instilling a false sense of what it takes to be successful, and allows them to steal and cheat. Willy’s father left when he was a baby and he only has one memory of his dad, “All I remember is a man with a big beard, and I was in mamma’s lap, sitting around a fire, and some kind of high music” (Miller 1232). After his older brother Ben leaves shortly thereafter to search for their father, it is assumed that Willy doesn’t have a male figure in his life during his upbringing to teach him the things that a father would teach a son, such as morals, and a sense of values, possibly helping him form a sense of identity. Because of this Willy feels a tremendous sense of loss. Willy confesses his sense of loss over his father’s abandonment to Ben.
They want a change in the education system so that children can prosper and be able to boost our declining economy. Children have always dreaded going to school because of boring classes and monotone teachers, but children are not only noticing this but so are influential adults. Robinson describes the school system as a factory forming students into what we want and banishing out the ones that do not reform into the model student. Moore agrees that the school system is suppressive when he says, “As soon as I entered high school-the public school system…I was walking the halls of a two-thousand-plus –inmate holding pen” (134). Moore felt trapped and earlier revealed that he dropped out of school sophomore year because he disliked school from first grade.
The second part will be about Luckys relationship with his parents and whether or not it was alright that they kicked him out like they did. The third and last part will be about life as an addict. ”Trash Walks” is a short story about a guy named Lucky. He’s only fifteen years old and already an addict. Because of his addiction, he is thrown out of his home by his parents.