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"