Magdoline Asfahani's Time To Look And Listen

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Time to Look and Listen By: Magdoline Asfahani Organization and Ideas 1. Asfahani recreates her experiences as a seventh-grader effectively. She portrays the relationship with her friends and family as she begins to experience discrimination. First, she says 7th grade was “the beginning of my political education” when the U.S. Marine Barracks had been bombed. This even caused a chain reaction and made her friends taunt her, attack her heritage, and make her ashamed of her own culture. She began to shut out her Arabic side. 2. Education is the most important subject in Asfahani’s essay because she concludes by saying, “Education is the key to understanding”. When her brother told his mother of the discrimination in his life, she went to his school and educated his peers. Through education one can learn to forget…show more content…
Asfahani’s reaction is completely realistic because she was embarrassed. She might have believed her parents would be angry with her if she told them she was ashamed of their culture. She states that “a child who is attacked often retreats” and during that time she retreated. Even though she was proved wrong after her brother confessed his same embarrassment. 4. She backs up her statement, “Education is the key to understanding”, by giving examples of how education is helping change people’s minds. For example she says, “Teachers, schools and the media are showing greater sensitivity to cultural issues”. 5. She appeals to the readers’ emotions. When she says that her parents’ accents humiliated her, you can feel her pain and embarrassment of something so trivial. Yu can feel her anger as she tells the reader of the snide remark about the Middle East coming from an adult. She uses reason to convince readers of the discrimination when her mother changes young children’s minds about some stereotypes. I think pathos predominates because one connects with the author on an emotional level and opens their mind to the existing problem.
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