“A Minnesota teacher of seventh and ninth grades says that she has to spend extra time in class editing papers and must 'explicitly' remind her students that is is not acceptable to use text slang and abbreviations in writing” (Cullington 89). Also, “many complain that because texting does not stress the importance of punctuation, students are neglecting it in their formal writing” (Cullington 89). These points are valid, but the evidence is limited because it is based on a few personal experiences, rather then a large study with much more research.
Rebecca states that the history of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells raises important issues regarding race, science, class and also ethics. After I finished reading the prologue this is what I got out of it. When I started reading this part of the book Rebecca Skloot shared with us how she stared at a picture on a wall of a woman she never met. After reading a little bit more I realized that this lady was Henrietta Lacks. In the picture Lacks was looking straight into the camera with a big smile on her face and her hands on her hips.
She states multiple times that the children within the education system are being cheated every day because they are not being forced to read more difficult books. “Such benefits are denied to the young reader exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral equations as well as to the student encouraged to come up with reductive, wrong-headed readings of mulitlayered texts” (Prose 97). The reader can blatantly see that Prose thinks negatively of the high school curriculum that today's students face. It seems clear that Prose does not want to hide her personal view or feelings, so she starts her essay out in a way that we do not have to read between the lines to get a sense of how she feels about what she is writing. She uses more emotional language when she says, "The intense loyalty adults harbor for books first encountered in youth is one probable reason for the otherwise baffling longevity of vintage mediocre novels, books that teachers may themselves have read in adolescence"(Prose
The technical convention of close-up shots is used to show the importance of education through the facial expressions which show desperation, anger and joy of the families of children applying for charter schools. During the final scenes of the documentary, we learn that some children were accepted and some were not. This makes the reader sympathize with the children who were not accepted. The symbolic convention of body language is used to show the importance of education through Ruby’s actions in the isolated classroom. On the seventh page of the book, Ruby is focused on doing her work in an isolated classroom; Ruby seemed to ignore the fact that she was isolated and fully immersed herself in her textbooks.
In the essay, “Mother Tongue,” by Amy Tan emphasizes the idea that we all speak different languages unconsciously and also we are categorized by the way we speck. In the essay Tan observes experiences that made her realized the different types of “Englishes” she uses. The first time she became aware was when giving a talk about her book, “The Joy Club,” she saw her mother in the audience and she realized that she had been using academic language learned from books, a language she had never used with her mother. The second time she noticed one of her “Englishes” was when talking with her mother and husband, she said “not waste money that way” which for her is an intimate language used only by her family. Tan emphasizes that fact that her mother recognizes her opportunities and interaction in life are limited by her English.
It is an interestingly and beautifully written poem. I can feel some humor, some sadness, and some warmness inside it. There was an incident in the author’s six grade that he was slapped the back of his head (Lee) by his teacher Mrs. Walker because he could not distinguish between the two words persimmon and precision. In America, foreign students are sometimes despised because they are not good at English language. The motif of the poem is persimmons.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism discusses the "imperialist narrativization of history" in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (Spivak 175). Because "imperialism" is "England's social mission" and "cultural representation of England to the English" and literature produces the "cultural representation" of the English, all texts are driven by a hidden motivation to support the existing "imperialist project" (Spivak 175). This imperialist project requires the "worlding'" of "Third World'" entities so that their cultures are "exploited" by the English and translated into British literary heritage until these "heritages" lose all identity with the original country (Spivak 175). "Axioms of imperialism" are configured in the basic structures of the English narrative to subtly drive the motivations of the novels and uphold the established ideals of English hierarchy over the "Third World" (Spivak 175). For instance, imperialist measures are masked in "childbearing," or "domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction," and "soul making," or "civil-society-through-social-mission" (Spivak 176).
In the documentary, “A Class Divided” filmed in 1970, a third grade teacher in Iowa named Jane Elliot did something that I felt was so amazing, during a time period that most might consider risky. She divided her class by the color of their eyes and came up with very clever ways to make them feel discriminated against. Watching the short film, about how she taught her class the lesson of discrimination, which was prompted by the death of Martin Luther King, is just fascinating! At first I was writing down everything I could to be able to reference my notes later, to write this paper. Suddenly I just stopped writing and really got into the lesson as though I was in the classroom with them.
Abby’s Lament starts off the beginning paragraph talking about Abby and how she doesn’t believe that her voice can be heard and that her opinion doesn’t matter. Yagelski believes she is wrong, everyone’s opinion matters in society. He believes that it can be heard through education and comprehension of literature. After the opening paragraph the essay goes into how Yagelski was at a high school talking to teachers and students about how during this era of technology and the internet that it is easier for people to make their voice be heard and to make a difference. When he makes the point that everyone can make their voice heard, Abby, one of the students said that hers does not matter in society and it can’t make an impact.
An example of a lie I personally told was one in 7th grade when my English teacher had assigned me a project that required me to read a book and make a poster with information on the book. I turned the poster into my teacher, but the poster I made was complete bullshit. I made up a book and did the poster on that, but the teacher had looked up the book and realized I lied about my project. If Stephanie Ericsson was to associate my lie with a name she stated in the essay it would most likely be an omission. Ericsson defines omission as “Telling most of the truth minus one or two key facts whose absence changes the story completely” (Ericsson 2), since I told my teacher I finished the project, but not that I didn’t do it correctly nor that I didn’t read a book.