Education as a Process - Article Example

Sara Naveed Dr. Tabitha Kenlon English 103 12 February Education as a Process Introduction In the story “The Achievement of Desire,” Rodriguez tells the reader about an extraordinary experience that he gets in the education sector that he went through. He also tackles a psychological battle between his family and his education. The writer uses the term "scholarship boy" to refer to a class of learners with the ability to study in their homes as well as when in the classrooms at school. These environments present the learner with some challenges that he or she must pass through and he talks about the destructions that a learner gets while studying at home as portrayed in his statement, "Mother is ironing, the wireless is on, someone is singing a snatch of song or even the father saying what comes into his head" (Rodriguez 517). Rodriguez decides to escape his current learning environment and take a step to adapt to another system. This paper will briefly talk about education as a process as it is displayed in Rodriguez school life story. Education as a Process In the story, Rodriguez puts trust in the classroom environment compared to the trust that he places in the home environment in his learnig process. He reports this in his statement, "what mattered to me was that my parents were not like my teachers" (Rodriguez 520). He further goes ahead and says that his parents were a perfect example of what he did not need to be in the future. While in school, the author receives a lot of encouragement from his parents, especially his mother. They do this to help him get the chances that they never had in their lives. Still, the boy who first entered a classroom without any knowledge of how to talk and write in English obtained the knowledge and twenty years later, he was one of the best in the language. His graduation from one level to the other while receiving various awards made the people that he met to give him congratulatory messages, and they all assumed that his parents were proud of his transformation. There are different factors that helped Rodriguez to succeed through their little contributions in the academic advances he made while at school. The factors also did not explain the kind of achievement that the writer managed while in school. Although a good student, the author was also a bad student, he was referred to as a scholarship boy who was very successful and very unconfident. At this stage, he explains how he developed some eagerness to learn and in the process became an unoriginal pupil. Rodriguez’s sisters and brothers came to enjoy the advantages from what he did and so they became successful as he was but unlike him, none of them was anxious as he was. As a student of second grade, Rodriguez was the one who corrected the grammatical errors that their parents did while at home. The behavior went on for some time, and he later announced to the family that his teachers had made it public that he was completely losing his Spanish traces. At this stage, Rodriguez states how he gets annoyed when his parents could not help him with his assignments. At third grade, the writer outgrew some of his behaviors; he became more tactful and more careful to maintain the two separate worlds each day with some confliction of interest and his integrity was increasing by the day. All these led to more dedication to the studies of the writer. With time, he became bookish which puzzled the whole family, and his ambitions completely separated him from his family. At some point, his brother saw him struggling with library books and could shout to him, "Hey, Four Eyes!" (Rodriguez 516), more surprisingly, his father found him in the closet busy reading a novel. His mother would find him reading late in the night when he was supposed to be sleeping and sometimes while he was supposed to be playing with the other kids outside the house. Severally, his mother would shout angrily at him asking, “What do you see in your books?” (Rodriguez 526) and it came a family joke to comment that Rodriguez was somewhere hiding when he was called and could not reply to the appeals. To this far, the process of education seems to have some difficulties as Rodriguez explains how his road to success in education is tough each day. He struggles his way until he succeeds and makes it up to possess a PhD. All what Rodriguez talks about is, it took him more than twenty years going through various stages of education. He admitted that his education was completely changing and separating him from the life that he used to enjoy while not a student. He kept this realization to himself keeping it far from his parents and the schoolteachers. At that stage in life, it was until his last months in school that he thought much about the reason for his much worked hard success. He then came to a realization that he needed to think more about the far that he had moved from his past, how the adult age finally confronted and how publicly he could say it. His childhood had gone away and he was in a position to admit to himself and to the people, who admired his success, they all expected his parents to be very proud of him but they could not understand the challenges that he had gone through, as he states, “Your parents must be very proud . . .” (Rodriguez 516). In his search for people dedicated like him, he writes, "My earliest teachers, the nuns, made my success their ambition" (Rodriguez 515), knowing the right reason he was sent to school. He receives many praises from his teachers; he also tends to act quickly at these with a lot of diction and direction. He finds ways of attracting attention from the teachers while still lacking self-confidence and self- acceptance. The encouragement that he gets from his teachers gets more important to him than his parents. He also experienced a shift in respect from his parents to the teachers. Rodriguez also reflects at a particular instance when returning home from the school with a compliment from one of the nuns that he has slowly lost his native accent and it is from this compliment that, the author develops more interest in the English lesson by reading and writing on each and homework that the nun suggests, and this led him to shy from social interactions. At the end of his education, in the British Museum when he was completely distracted to finish his dissertation, he read for several weeks, read with a lot of speed and used the internet through his modem to read most of the online books. It became rare for him to hear or find a student close to what he was at that time. He later recognized the impacts of his studies and life of the boy at the school. In his schooling life, he reflected the need to separate the learner from his/her parents and how to include them in school functions like giving of awards and other activities that make the teachers to interact with the parents. In his viewpoint, he compares the environment of the classroom and that of their home as two different education worlds. He says that his home environment was so noisy for any learner to grasp anything because everything was centered in the living room. He later describes the school environment as being ample; the discussion time in the school allows a learner to have time to think about the ideas that he learns in the school that was never available at home. At the stage of his separation, Rodriguez had entirely lost all his admiration for the parents because of his believe that the teachers were able to educate him, unlike his parents. He does all these not because of anybody’s dreams but because of his culture. The repulsive nature of Rodriguez is bound to continue until that particular time when one of them is willing to change and understand one another. Rodriguez never took any of his time to make up the relationship between his family and him due the fact that knowledge and books were the most important things in his life than his family until at the end of the story when he finally decides to go home and be with his parents. Rodriguez reached the point of sacrificing his aspects just to imitate the teachers. The feeling was comfortable in the beginning, but it slowly turned to be a curse to him, a burden and a task to accomplish. Rodriguez measured his achievement by counting the number of pages that he read per day and could scrutinize and read a book that he had difficulties in understanding just to satisfy his feelings. There was a transformation from where he read to understand to a point where he was like a scanner that just scanned the words without understanding. Conclusion In conclusion, education as a process from the story is portrayed as a tough process where an individual has to put a lot of efforts in making it to the highest levels of the process. Rodriguez meets lots of resistance right from his parents and other family members throughout his education process; he even meets resistance from his schoolmates but receives lots of encouragements from his teachers. Finally, he is in a position to overcome all these situations and makes it earn a PhD in English surprisingly. Works Cited Rodriguez, Richard. “The Achievement of Desire.” Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010. 513-532. Print. Grading Rubric for ENGL 103 A B C D F Content (50 points) Quality of ideas Connection of ideas (coherence) Development of ideas (sufficient support) Maturity level of ideas Relevance of ideas (unity) Awareness of audience Demonstrates clear understanding of the text Realistic literary interpretation 45-50 40-44 35-39.9 35 30-34.9 0-29.9 Use of Sources (20 points) Correct Works Cited page using MLA format Well-chosen quotes Accurate paraphrases Concise summaries of the primary source Seamless integration of source material Balanced amounts of quotes/paraphrases/summaries Appropriate use of primary sources Avoidance of plagiarism Correct MLA in-text citation Clear distinction between writer’s ideas and source material Purpose of source material clearly apparent 18-20 15.4-17.9 15 13.4-15.3 12-13.3 0-11.9 Vocabulary/Language Use/Mechanics (20 points) All conventions/materials covered in ENGL 101 Generally meets conventions of academic writing Uses topic-specific vocabulary 18-20 15.4-17.9 15 13.4-15.3 12/13/03 0-11.9 Organization (10 points) Clearly indicated rhetorical style Appropriate paragraphing Logical organization within paragraphs 9-10 7.7-8.9 6.7-7.6 6 6.0-6.6 0-5.9 Formatting The Title Block with proper information Name and page numbers on each page of text Double-spaced text Appropriate margins Appropriate font and font size First line of paragraphs indented No big spaces in between paragraphs 0 0 -1 -2 -3 -4 Proofreading Spelling errors Typing errors Repetition of words or phrases Words run together Hyphenation problems Wrong words (“were” instead of “where”) 0 -2 -2 -4 -6 -8 Total 69 /100 Although you present some good details, you lack many of the basic elements of an academic essay: thesis statement, the introductory paragraph and conclusion. The organizational structure is unclear, making it very difficult for readers to follow the process you are discussing. A clear organization will also help you move from just summarizing into analyzing the significance of the education process and how Rodriguez presents the information. Read More