Scholarship Boy

               The Achievement of Desire by Richard Rodriguez is an example of autoethnographic for it is about a Spanish child going to an American school where we starts out not knowing much English to where it seems like he is losing his Spanish background.  Throughout the article he talks about being a scholarship boy.  Not one that needs help in schooling but one that excels in it.  In the text the boy tells a story about his school career and how he is so successful. 

               At the begging of the story he tells you that his parents helped him be successful and his brother and two sisters helped him for he wanted some trophies that they were bringing home for himself.  Latter in the text he says that his success is from wanting to learn all the way through school.  He starts off with a story that he is in front of the class and his hardly able to speak for he cannot speak the language very good.  This show autoethnographic for he is from Mexico and his having trouble communicating with his fellow students.  This shows us that since he is from somewhere else he is having to find out new ways of expressing himself in order to do good in school.

               Latter he talks about how when he got into the third grade he asked his father to help him with some math homework.  The father kept reading over the directions over and over again trying to understand them but could not.  He eventually took the book away and said that he would try it a little bit longer by himself.  You can also see a gap when he likes to read and his parents could find him reading in some quit place in the house instead of doing some work that he needed to get done.  With all his reading he did end up finding a book about other kids that had the same problems has him and what happened to them positively and negatively.

               As he advances in school he always found ways that he could stay after school and help the teachers for he got along with them more than his own family for he felt that they understood him better.  For he read every book that his grammar teachers told him to read and frequently when back to them and ask them about it and if he should like it.  Once he got into fourth grade he was able to get along with his parents closing the gap in the cultural barrier that now separated him from his parents, brother, and two sisters.

               As he got older and into high school he found it more difficult for people are looking at the person that you were in early years of your educational career and looking at how you have changed.  He faced another barrier where he was still closely to being the same kid as he was in elementary and middle school as he got into high school.  This made another gap that was between him and his fellow classmates.

               All of this are examples of autoethnographic and this text is full of a lot more at the advances in his educational career and beyond.   Even if you thought that this would not be an interesting story just thank how you can relate it to something and you could see how it applies for some people might read this story and thank it had nothing to do with autoehnographic and some people would think that some parts where and some parts where not.  To see what you think about the topic read the article and find out what you think about it.

How writing poor first drafts is like anything else that you want to get good at.

               In the past I have written a lot of papers for school a lot of the time we follow this proses by making multiple drafts and having our classmates go over them.  In a couple of my classes the teacher would put up a short writing assignment that we would need to write about that he was not picking up sometime this was a little practice writing about a bigger assignment that we were going to do and this was just a simple and informal way to get our thoughts down on paper.  

               Friare and Pratt both have a way of saying that learning is about trial and ear and not just memorizing a bunch of facts.  This is like how Lamott is about writing where it is trial and ear where first you get your thoughts down on paper then you go from there by adding stuff to it, taking stuff out, rearranging it to make it sound better.  You would do this like 2 or 3 times or until you get it where you like how it sounds.  I did this with the speech that I had to do over the weekend.  I first made a bulleted list of what I wanted to say then put the bullets in order that I wanted to say them in.  After I did all that I wrote my speech by expanding on each bullet point and putting it into paragraphs.

               Most of the time I fill like how Lamott said how she felt when she wrote her review how she got all scared about someone seeing the draft and thanking that she is a terrible writer.  I fill like this all the time when I am writing for I do not like other people reading my stuff till I have had time to go over it and revise it.  Sometimes I have to put the writing aside for a moment and do something that is totally not related to the paper like play a game for a little or read a book that I happen to be reading at the moment just like how Lamott does with her reviews.

               I also relate this to me shooting a bow for I am starting out with a low powered bow that is easy to pull back so that I can get the bases of my form down and get used to using those muscles.  This is like writing your first draft where you just get everything down on a piece of paper where you are worming up your mind on what you are going to write about and you do not care if you hit your mark or not for you are just getting the form down on how you are going to write the paper.

               I can also relate this to my scouting career for I have been on many outing and each build on each other for when you first start you have no clue on what to take but the more campouts you go on you refine what you need to take and find out what we forgot and make it better for the next trip you are going on.  Also in scouting we just teach you the basics at the beginning then as you move up through the ranks you learn more and find out what needs to be done to make it a better experience for you and the other boys in the troop.

               So writing a poor first draft in not a bad thing for you have to build on something that you first did not know what to do and just keep refining it and practicing to make it better.

Contact Zone

Mary Louise Pratt wrote “Arts of the Contact Zone” which is a place where you learn differently and everybody interprets things in a different way and through different ways like her son made a connection to the world through baseball cards.  Also the Contact Zone you can be in a group of people and talk about the positive and the negative aspects of each person’s beliefs and religion without fighting for some people will still get mad but it is a way that made it where nobody stayed mad over the subject.

Now I am going to use Pratt’s Contact Zone to talk to you about the Hebdo Attack in Paris.  The attack was made by two Islamic terrorist who forced their way into a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist in Paris and shot eleven people and wounded eleven more.  During the attack the shooters where shouting "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is [the] greatest").

Some of the cartoonist rendering of the attack look like they mostly go off the saying that the “pin is mightier than the sword” or in this case the gun.  One of the cartoons is a line of people on the left side trying to talk to god who is sitting on a chair that is on a cloud on the right hand side and is on a blue background which could stand for the sky.  They seem like they are trying to get his attention but all they are doing is giving him a headache.

Another cartoon is where the two shooters are in the building that they just done shooting up and the shooter on the right hand side is holding a pin and the one on the left is asking “What is this little weapon that hurt us so much”.  Which is showing that the cartoons that Hebdo where making where offensive to the Islamic people to make them thank that the only way to make them stop is to go in and shoot the Hebdo staff.  In the Contact Zone that Pratt wrought there was a class where most people where from different backgrounds and they talked about the different background with made some people mad but they never did resort to valance for when you are in the Contact Zone you can put up with it for you were also show the others the faults in their religion or other beliefs.

This brings me to another cartoon where the shooter on the left is saying “He drew first” and the person he shot is lying face down on the ground after being shot. This one is also saying that if the Hebedo staff did not make those cartoons they would not of came and shot them for they thought they could end the cartoons by using violence and not just asking them to stop in one way or another.  Which I thank builds off of another cartoon that is a bunch of religious leader sitting around and reading “The big fat book of offensive religious cartoons” Now this cartoons is like the Contact zone for they religious leaders are not killing the person that wrought the book but are laughing together at the cartoons that are about their religion and that of everybody else’s religion and they are just sitting around and laughing together not shooting each other.

So to me most of the cartoons where based on the theme that the pin is mightier than the sword which all of the valance could have been averted if they just took the lime to look at the other religious cartoons and not just the ones about them and see that they were not the only ones being made fun of.