There
are any number of issues you may respond to with Rodriguez’s essay “The
Achievement of Desire,” but I’ll throw out two for your consideration:
1)
What is your response to Rodriguez’s sense of his parents as he’s
growing up “a scholarship boy”? He frequently expresses a mix of
emotions, from pride to shame, admiration to embarrassment. Do you find
yourself forgiving him, or do you find yourself holding him to account,
or somewhere in between? Remember, of course, that he’s reflecting as an
adult on his memory of being a child.
2) Rodriguez writes, “…education is a long, unglamourous, even demeaning process–a nurturing never natural to the person one was before one entered a classroom.
At once different from most other students, the scholarship boy is also
the archetypal “good student.” He exaggerates the difficulty of being a
student, but his exaggeration reveals a general predicament. Others are
changed by their schooling as much as he. They too must re-form
themselves” (352-53).
What
does Rodriguez mean by this? How is education demeaning and
“unnatural”? And why and how must we re-form ourselves in schools? What
is it about education that puts us in this position?