The purpose of this paper is to engage the ideas put forth by Rodriguez and Rich in their essays by considering your own experience of learning up to this point in your life. Implicit in this exploration is to investigate where you have come from and to reflect on how that history has influenced who you are today. Rich and Rodriguez give you two models of what a literacy narrative might look like.
Breaking this down a bit more, who you are today suggests that you have certain values that guide your decisions and establish your priorities. For example, you decide how and where you will spend your time. Obviously, you are in college right now. You have certain ideas of what being in college constitutes; those ideas came from somewhere. How does your history as a learner connect with your present experience as a college student? Do your attitudes toward learning that have developed over the years have an impact on the way you approach your coursework? Have they influenced your choice of major or potential career?
Write an essay that explores your views of education by incorporating some of the formative moments in your education and by responding to at least two of the “big ideas” you found in your readings of Rodriguez and Rich. For example, you might reflect, as Rodriguez and Rich do, on some aspects of yourself that you had to “lose” in order to be successful as a student or to think of yourself as “normal.” As you move toward a conclusion, consider what you would desire your present and future experiences of education to look like and what might have to change in the process.
I am purposely not giving you a preset outline of how you should organize your paper, but if you read the paragraphs above closely, you’ll see that I have suggested a narrative flow for your paper. My intention is in someways to give you more ideas than you can or should explore in a single paper. Your job is to decide which of the suggestions I gave are most relevant to the story you want to tell. The yellow highlighted paragraph contains the “kernel” of the assignment, so pay particular attention to it.
I have provided a previous student essay below so you can see a possible approach to this assignment.
Note: this is the only assignment where first person pronoun usage (“I”) is acceptable. Indeed, it is unavoidable, since you are discussing your intellectual biography. For future writing assignments, you will not use the first person. The second person pronoun (“you”) is never acceptable, i.e. do not address the reader.
The paper should be a minimum of 1,000 words. Follow MLA document design carefully. Failure to do so will result in a grade deduction.
Be sure to engage at least one of these readings directly and substantively in your own essay. Document all quotations carefully using MLA format.
Proofread your final draft carefully. Avoid such deadly errors as comma splices, run-on sentences, fragments, and faulty possessives. An excessive number of basic writing errors (generally more than five) will result in automatic failure of the essay, regardless of its other strengths.
