The Inheritance of Tools Questions

1. "A week or so later a white scar in the shape of a crescent moon began to show above the cuticle, and month by month it rose across the pink sky of my thumbnail." I just found it engaging for Sander's use of imagery to describe his swollen thumb after slamming a hammer on it.

2. ex 1. "My cobbled-together guitars might have been alien spaceships, my barns might have been models of Aztec temples"

ex 2. "He learns how to swing a hammer from the elbow instead of the wrist, how to lay his thumb beside the blade to guide a saw, how to tap a chisel with a wooden mallet, how to mark a hole with an awl before starting a drill bit."

3. The section about the gerbils was organized in a way similar to a story. Each paragraph was created when a new thought was formed, each kind of...layering one another, overlapping.

4. I'm not really sure if I'm answering this question correctly (mostly because I'm really confused right now) but in the gerbil section, he was able to save his daughter's gerbils from (possible) death. The conclusion that came shortly after started with his father's death. Sanders couldn't do anything to save his father from his death. There was no door he could open, no wall he could tear down to bring his father back. However, all of the lessons he learned from his father as a child, was something that he has to keep his father living through him. So he continued building, just as his did his entire life before passing.

5. To his daughter, the gerbils in the wall is a "calamity", a circumstance in which she's crying for rescue. The radio was giving out worldwide catastrophes where people are crying for rescue, too. If Sanders had to rescue those people from those kinds of situations, he would be afraid of failing, or even just not being able to handle the situation, but the situation he's in right now was something he could handle and could do without fail.

6. Sanders compares his hammer to other classics from history such as the greek vases or "dawn stones". These historic artifacts have a timeless beauty to them; comparing his hammer to them, Sanders insists that his hammer has a timeless beauty to it, too.

7. He's working and living just as his father did before him. Now that his father has passed, he lives on with the lessons and every technique his father taught him. The last sentence was him acting upon some of the many timeless lessons his father taught him when he was young.

Welp. I tried.

Once More on the Lake Questions

1) White's attitude seems reminiscent in a way within his opening paragraphs. He was speaking about his past memories and making it sound like a story he's telling to other children, like a bedtime story.

2) White's selection of details provided imagery for the reader. For example he said, "I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot–the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind." In saying this, he provided the reader with the image of what the lake looked like when he was young along with the image of the lake possibly changing completely.

3) A. "There were cottages sprinkled around the shores" – personification. It provided imagery for the reader so they could visualize the scenery better. 

    B. White also tends to list when describing thing and/or actions that were made. For example, he said, "We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were mackerel, pulling them over the side of the boat in a businesslike manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the back of the head."

    C. There's also the asyndeton he used to create this poetic effect such as "Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end;"

4) He applies to all of our senses, even touch. He mentioned in the fifth paragraph, "I felt the damp moss covering the worms in the bait can," appealing to our sense of touch, adding to the effect of imagery.

5) He was comparing and contrasting the motors back in the time when he was a child to the time now that he was an adult. He used similes, metaphors, and personification to help him describe to the readers what the motors sounded like.

6) White was reminiscing in his memories again, and the readers get a piece of why the lake was such an important part of his childhood.

7) The sentence seemed unfinished, as if he was purposely leaving us in suspense, leaving space there for the readers to fill(interpretation),  kind of like we're doing now.

8) It was another piece of imagery White used that mostly parents and adults would relate with. He was describing his realization of how old he was getting after watching his son doing things that he used to do when he was a child.

9) Mr. Giddings, I'm not counting the "and"s in this story. That involves numbers and numbers mean math, so no.

With the amount of "and"s he used in this passage gave all of his details a sense of connectedness. "And"s group things up together. Like in lists, they would be used to list a bunch of things that are somehow connected in some way. The "and"s in his story has the same purpose, so that all of the many details he had about the lake could be interconnected.

Hunger of Memory Reading Response

Mr. Giddings, I honestly don't know what to write...

Richard Rodriguez said in his work, Hunger of Memory, "Perhaps because I have always, accidentally, been a classmate to children of rich parents, I long ago came to assume my association with their world" (3). Rodriguez tells that he has always been around rich, privileged people since he was young. The beginning of his story even mentions wealthy places and things like Bel-Air cocktail parties, Belgravia dinner parties, tuxedos, New York, things that aren't common parts of a man's life with a lower social status than the wealthy. Even in his adult life, he is surrounded by rich people. He became "a comic victim of two cultures" (5).

Now, the two cultures he's split between is his Mexican culture that he was born and raised in, and the American culture that he had "assimilated" into. He had always been different from the people around him. In childhood, he's was isolated. Adulthood, he was welcomed. In childhood, he was intensely close with his family, with his Mexican culture. In his adult life, he became more familiar with the American ways and adapted to the culture.

His story seems to be about changing and fitting in, assimilation. The books he stole at the beginning of his story, could they by any chance be the classic volumes of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lawrence that were later mentioned near the end of the passage? The idea of him "stealing" the American books can in a way represent him stealing a part of American culture. It wasn't his to begin with, but it looked like a really amazing thing to have, so he decided to get it some way, somehow. And by taking in to a new culture, he throws away his original one, which explains why he said that his parents were no longer his parents, but "in a cultural sense" (4).

I'm sorry Mr. Giddings...This is all I can think of...

Emerson's On Education Questions

1. Emerson describes his view of an ideal education to be one where the teacher shouldn't just focus on what they have to say, but allow the students to participate and discuss their thoughts and opinions. They are to be respected for their opinions not only by their fellow classmates, but by the teacher also. He also believed that there should be passion within education, since that passion is what drives the students to learn more and seek more information, more answers.
3. I'm not entirely sure what this quote means in all honesty. What I got from it is that it's better to teach a perfect subject that has no need for reform than an imperfect subject that can be changed into something else years from now. I'm not sure if that was right though...
5. I didn't even know what a bureaucratic institution was. So, these institutions, first of all, do not focus on the descriptions of Emerson's idea of the ideal education. The learning experience doesn't fuel their passion, but drain it. The students are there with a purpose of passing tests and preparing to live in the real world(doing all of the business stuff, just work, no passion or creativity whatsoever). People don't learn much in these institutions besides how to imitate everyone else to survive reality.


1. I think Emerson was saying that thinking things through on our own comes naturally and we "enjoy" it, but imitating everyone else's thoughts instead of creating our own is something that we, by nature, don't like to do.
2. It's a paradoxical statement because in order to become a genius, you have to dive deeper into the topic, collecting and understanding the information thrown at you. You have to dig deeper(like a drill) in order to gain the wisdom and knowledge you need to become the genius you want to be.
3. Emerson used an extended example of an actual person who supports his thesis, since his life reflects Emerson's thoughts and beliefs about education.
5. The natural method that Emerson mentions seems to be the little things that people will take an interest in, a topic that piqued their curiosity, and they learned with passion and determination by masters who were also passionate about the subject at hand.
8. I don't even understand what the quote is saying...I don't know what to say, he feels like it would be useless to change the ways of teaching to a more natural method, because if he did, it would no longer be a natural method, but a systematic one?
9. A person's will, when inside a system similar to the bureaucratic institutions, kind of gets tossed aside. It no longer matters what you want, but what the man in charge wants instead.
10. "Even so, by observing the routine ways of people and the consequences that soon follow after tends to invoke this fear/idea that stopping someone from doing something terrible is worse than just letting it happen."
11. It was a way in speaking directly to us, that way we weren't just reading some kind of essay where someone babbles on about their beliefs, but they actually try to connect with you while doing so as a way to get you to connect with the text a little more(?).
12. Emerson's tone of the essay was pretty formal, professional, as if he were talking to fellow adults, maybe teachers and professors at schools and colleges. Parts of it almost felt like a story where you're reading endless descriptions about a child's life before all of the important action stuff starts happening, but overall, it was a formal piece.

Superman and Me - Exploring the Text Questions

1. He used oxymoron in the quote. The things he listed contradicted each other like hope and fear.
2. His father studied in a Catholic school and was a reader. He always bought books and brought them home. Indians are stereotypically dumb and uneducated, so his father clashes with the stereotype and most definitely proves them wrong.
3. He described grammar and writing with organization in a way that even children would be able to understand. It is deep and effective, but simple and easy to understand at the same time.
4. He most likely spoke about his life as if he was telling a story about another man who went through these amazing struggles or adventures. He placed his past in the past and if he brought up, he spoke about it as if he was talking about someone else other than himself.
6. He organized these different topics that he wanted to talk about into different sections in a way where they could support the previous section and help the reader understand what he was trying to say. It's kinda like building block of information and details, piling up on top of each other until it looks like a tower.
7. Alexie's parallel structure included the word "read" when he was talking about all of the things he read. It was like a laundry list of how much he truly cared about reading. To add to the literary effect, he ended each parallel structure with a sentence similar to "I'm trying to save my life." It was a beautiful part of the essay, showing how important reading and knowledge is to people, and how much he cherished it.

Education Questions (I Know Why The Caged Bird Cant Read)

1. Prose is an award winning critique and a mother of two sons. Those roles combined with her familiarity with a variety of books gives her the credibility she needs in order to be taken seriously in this essay.
2. SKIP
3. Prose finds that it's useless to throw random symbolism and analyzations at students and trying to stuff their brains with them. That way of teaching literature makes the students loathe reading. Students would be able to enjoy reading more if they weren't forced to analyze every metaphor and symbolic allusion and throwing each scene into a juxtaposition to compare and find any motifs in the book. (Honestly, that last part is practically sophomore year in English...)
4. Prose appeals to logos by using examples of literature, analyzing and comparing them to help support her thesis.
5. In a way, it appears she does assume the audience is familiar with some of the novels, especially novels like Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, where she doesn't even explain the plot of the book so much as to give a quote that she wanted to analyze from it. Now, the idea that she assumes that the audience would be familiar with the novels causes her essay to lose its effect. The audience doesn't know what the speaker is talking about and therefore doesn't understand the point she is trying to make.
6. Ew no. I could never agree with that. That is obviously a biased opinion and that's her thought, not mine. She's trashing another woman's work recklessly without a legitimate reason as to why. It's an irritating remark and would've been better left out since that piece of text killed her credibility.
7. Isn't it to get us thinking about everything she was talking about in the essay, to get us processing the information she had just exposed us to in order to understand her stance better and the essay better?
8. I think it would have. Having other people's thoughts and opinions on the matter rather than just stating her own would've made her argument more plausible. At least, it would've been more credible to me since it's not just a biased opinion, but also includes other people's opinions that helps support her thoughts.
9. Can I honestly say same as number three? The teachers tend to be lazy in their teachings and lack in giving the students an appreciation for literature. Not only that, students are taught to value the background rather than the quality of the writing itself. Teachers also have the tendency to characterize dead authors and poets as "perfect" which kind of draws this line between their work and the amount of criticism students are allowed to give. With all of these factors combined, the teachers end up narrowing the students' literary experience and cause them to lose interest in reading and literature.
10. It was more of recommendations rather than solutions. The entirety of her essay consisted of her own thoughts and her own opinions, which weakened her argument drastically in my eyes. It was an interesting read, considering she did not hold her thoughts back, but there were places where she probably should've thought more...cautiously. Credibility can be hard to gain, but easy to lose. Her data consisted of commentary, not facts or statistics.

Analyzing a Visual Text

This ad caught my attention because of the innocence within the scene. Any parent could look at this and reminisce on the days they would find their children playing with something that wasn't meant for them whether it be a mother's heels, a father's shaving cream, or any other adult "toy" the child would find lying around.

Once you look closer, however, you'll notice that this was an advertisement about locking up weapons, and the purity you once saw in the picture disappears as a visual image of the little boy playing with his mother's pads changed into him picking up a gun he found in his father's closet.

To add to their message, they provided text stating, "If they find it, they'll play with it." With the situation above, it just shows the context of the boy finding the pads and tampons and messing around with them, but applying the text with the scene where the boy finds a gun in the closet, the next implied situation would be the boy "playing" with the gun.

Such a powerful statement made with so little words. The connections made between the work, the creator of the work, and the purpose for the work all works together in giving the peers the message the speaker was trying to say.

Questions on Rhetoric and Style

I did this on a piece of paper originally, so I apologize....

1. Orwell's thesis is that the English language has been declined to ruin. It was more implied than it was directly stated.
2. I actually found it effective. It's a relative topic that most people can understand and/or imagine vividly.
3. Paragraph 4-----"tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." I didn't really understand the meaning behind it, so it wasn't entirely effective in my opinion. Paragraph 5 was filled with dying metaphors that effective whatsoever such as "Ring the changes on." Paragraph 12-----"presentable by a sheer humbug." It was kind of effective, considering that it referenced a well-known story, A Christmas Carol. I still didn't understand it as easily though, considering how simple my mind is. [I hope this is enough examples????]
4. For me, the paragraphs lost a lot of important details that could have helped me (and other readers) understand Orwell's thesis better.
5. As far as I know, the footnotes are there to help explain things that might not be well-known, but without getting off-topic.
6. Well, I found his work more credible through the many detailed sources he used and the information he pulled out from each of his sources. The details are what convinced me, not his reputation
7. His essay was very well organized, aside from that one HUGE paragraph made me hate my life. The generic order of the paper was beautiful, however. The essay flowed nicely, too.
8. The answer is similar as the first question: He wanted to inform everyone about the English language and the horrible state it's in. The purpose of the post-World War II historical context----he was practically just using it as an example as to the how low the English language stands.
9. The tone of Orwell's essay was sophisticated and relaxed, almost as if it was a script to a professor's lecture to his english class in college. It never really switched tones unless he was giving examples.
10. 
    

• Dying metaphor: "tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse."
• Operators/Verbal False Limbs: "give an air of"
• Pretentious Diction: "scientific impartiality to biased judgments"

Heyman's Essay

Heyman's essay appeared to have a similar shape to the classical model when organizing her information. The majority of it was narration however, giving the audience and idea about what they're talking about in detail. The Myths section did seem to be a huge refutation section, showing the counterargument to emphasize her position. This argument seems to contain mostly facts, meant mostly for informing others and helping them understand her point of view on the topic.
Since it contains mostly facts and description, the most prevailing pattern would be narration with a bit of description.

Rhetorical Einstein

I can't say that I will explain this very well, because chances are I probably won't... However, I'll explain it in the best way I possibly can.
In terms with the speaker-subject-audience relationships, Einstein wrote a letter to a student explaining to her religion in science. When forming his letter, he wrote in a simplistic manner as a way to help her understand rather than speaking to her in higher formalities which she would probably need a dictionary or a science teacher to help her understand what she just read. He even stated in the beginning of his letter that he tried to make it as simple as possible for her.
The purpose of the letter was that Einstein wanted her to understand where religion stands when it comes to science. He spoke about scientists' lack of faith when it comes to choosing a religion. However, due to scientific research and studies, scientists do believe in the possibility of there being a divine being. It's not that they all of a sudden have faith in the God that everyone else "blindly follows" though. They just have an open mind about a superior being ruling over everything.
As far as I know, the credibility of the letter should be pretty high considering that Einstein is a scientist himself, and that should account for his logic as well. I can't say that there was much emotion drawn from the letter though...maybe towards the end when he spoke about the possibility of a superior being.
From what I was able to draw from the letter, Einstein was rhetorically effective within his letter.

I hope I answered it well enough?

Just a random thought...

Even the strongest walls can crumble and fall. Nothing is meant to be prefect, simple, and bliss. Everyone is bound to make mistakes in their lives...CONSISTENTLY. The thing that truly matters is not the experience, but what you do with the experience to make tomorrow a little better.