Post 8 – Veiled Intentions: Don’t Judge a Muslim Girl by her Covering

Don’t judge a Muslim girl by her covering is written by Maysan Haydar, a feminist who chose to wear a Hijab (headscarf) at the age of 12. She talks about the “Seeming contradictions of my life” (Haydar). Haydar is a social worker in New York City.

Haydar talks about how she started wearing the headscarf, she tells the authors about her intentions to wear the scarf. She just started wearing the scarf because she wanted to get involved in the Girl Talk. This was a game when all girls got together and discussed all the private and embarrassing things in their life. Haydar wanted to be able to discuss those things too; wearing the headscarf was considered a sign of becoming a woman for a girl. She wanted to be able to receive that attention from others as she saw her friends receive when they wore it.

In this article Haydar reflects upon the changes she saw in herself and the way she started respecting the headscarf and the values that came with it as she grew up. The headscarf is supposed to be not to stop a women from living her life, but to be able to cover herself to men who would see her as a sex object rather than who she is as a person. She believes that when she moved to New York she really started seeing the advantages of wearing the head scarf. Here she used the example of construction workers who feel it necessary to comment on any girl passing and says how she prefers the comments she receives which are still more decent to the ones she has heard of from other girls.

She then talks about how she does not understand the view other women have of her, and how others believe that she is not living a full life because of having a headscarf. She recalls the time she sat in a bus and saw a girl staring at her as if she is trapped in her clothing. Haydar, on the other hand, felt that the girl sitting there with her tight jeans, styled hair and makeup, was more trapped than Haydar ever was.

This article is very interesting and coming from a Muslim country I could understand how she feels. I know that veiled girls don’t have a problem with their dressing and all they wish is that people could see them as normal as everyone else and not just as a different cast, someone who could not fit in because they can. Their lives are no different than ours, they do all the things we do, they eat, they go out, they travel, all we need to do is try and understand that just because they dress differently does not mean they are different.

Post 7: Stephen Cruz

Stud Terkel has compiled several books by interviewing people, mostly on subjects like race, faith and the Great Depression. Terkel has also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II. In this article he represents Stephen Cruz, a man who seems to be living the American dream, but as he progresses towards this dream he realizes how what a person dreams is not always true.

The article starts with Cruz talking about how the life cycle starts with your grandparents earning some money first, then your parents and then when it is the child turn to get into the league. Stephen Cruz was someone who had good education and a degree in masters at the time of the Depression. He got his degree in engineering and masters in business. Having such great education, he got many job offers at a young age. After graduation he already had fourteen job offers and knew that he could have a lot more if he had looked more. He was a self confident man who did not care that he was a Mexican, though he was aware of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he truly believed that his job offers were because of his abilities and not because of the government laws.

He signed for his first job at Procter and Gamble as a supervisor. After just two years he was promoted to personnel and he felt that was the effect of his hard work. He later realized that he was not given many privileges as the other personnel and was there more to handle the other minority groups coming in the business. He even tried to raise the issue at a meeting asking them to employ more African American people, Mexican people; in short other minority groups should be given jobs too.   Upon lack of response, he himself employed an African American secretary for himself, who got fired by his boss while he was on a business trip. At this point he realized that discrimination still existed in every business just that it had become more discreet. He had been employed for handling other minority groups more than for his abilities to be able to perform his tasks well. Later, he left that job and took on another job, once again something he had to work according to the others. His employers would give him the exact way to do things and he was supposed to just follow through as if his opinion didn’t count.

As he concludes the article, Cruz talks about how the American dream didn’t turn out to be the way he had expected it to be. He says that the American dream is not governed by education, opportunity and hard work, but by power and fear. And more the person rises in the hierarchy, the more he loses the dream. This change in belief shows how Cruz has grown into the person he didn’t think he would be. He wanted to live the American dream, to be rich and famous and have everything he wanted, but he realized that while sounding so exotic, the life behind this dream is very different and nowhere like the one a person imagines.

This is an interesting article showing the growth of a man in the society and how he is coming to realize the ways of the world. The article starts with a graduate student imagining living an amazing life with all his degrees and great jobs and ends with a much older and mature man coming out of the experiences he has faced in the real world and seen behind the scenes of the ways of the world.

Post 6: Para Teresa

This is a poem means ‘For Teresa’, this is a poem dedicated to the authors friend, Teresa who she remembers and wants to tell her how she understands her view on life after all these years. Ines Hernandez Avila, the author of this poem is an assistant professor in Native American studies at the University of California, Davis.

This poem starts with the author dedicating her poem to her friend. She talks about the first meeting she had with Teresa and how her and her friends teased her. They asked her why did she always try to be so smart, assumed that she was trying to be a teacher’s pet. The author at this point in the poem shows that she was not trying to work hard for the teachers, but she was actually doing it for her parents and her grandparents. These she explains are people who have worked hard in order for her to be able to study and she wanted to take full advantage of this opportunity. She explains how her parents did not have what she could get in life and she wanted to prove to them that she could do something in life for them.

Avila understands however, as she has grown up how Teresa must have felt. She knew that the only reason Teresa may have mocked her was because she was scared by her power of knowledge. She felt inferior to Avila and the only reason she needed to tease her was because she felt better by putting Avila down. Avila, on the other hand, talks about how she felt that everyone was equal and her only motive was to show her family that she could study and make something of her life. Avila also strongly believed that if she could study, so could all the others.

She felt that even though she could not say anything to Teresa, even though they were two completely different people with different views, they were still together; “ Pero Fuimos Juntas”.

 In the end Avila names Teresa her sister, she understands how Teresa felt and what she went through. She respects the way Teresa handled her situation and was on top of everyone else even though she felt insecure. She was able to mark her position.

This article gives a great insight to how two completely diverse students could be, someone who is focused to someone who seems to be careless and the school bully. They both have the same motives as well as the same fears in life, just every different ways of approaching the same situation. This is something every person should consider before blaming others for not seeing things their way.

 

Post 5: I Just Wanna be Average

This article is written by Mike Rose, publisher of several poetries, scholarly research, a textbook and two widely praised books on education in America. He is a professor in the school of education at UCLA and has won awards from the national academy of education, the national council of teachers of English and the john Simon Guggenheim memorial foundation.  This article discusses Rose’s start in his career, when he was taking vocational education.

This article starts with Rose talking about his first impression when he walks into the vocational education class. “A funny mix brought together by geography and parental desire”, Rose says this line right after he explains about the many different students in his class and the different cultures. This line represents the fact that Rose sees how it different people from so many different cultures could come together just with one thing in common: the vocational education class.

In the article Rose talks about his walk through his class and how it gave him the career he has today. He starts by talking about how he was failing his classes and how his professors all had different methods of teaching. He talks about how he did start learning things eventually, he mentions the first time he heard one of his colleagues say that he ‘just wants to be average’. This line really touches Rose as he thinks about how someone would just want to be average, Rose always thought that everyone wanted to be someone special,  an athlete, a teacher, etc… till he heard Ken Harvey’s opinion on the matter. Slowly he started understanding how it was important to be just average to be on top.

Rose then tells his readers about his father’s death and how it almost made him lose hope of things, how he just kept thinking about everything. That’s when Jack MacFarland came into his life and gave him a new opening. Though Rose’s grades were bad, MacFarland gave him hope again and told him that he was good in writing, after pulling a few strings he got Rose into the college he studied in and helped Rose realize his potential and become the famous person he is today.

This article is very interesting and gives an insight to the inner thoughts many well motivated as well as less motivated students may have. While some may lose hope, one day everyone will be where they need to be, everyone has one talent or the other, it’s just till they realize their talents till they get what they want in life. If Rose had walked away from going into college he might not have realized his writing skills, but MacFarland made him realize his potential and following those steps was probably the best thing Rose could have done for him.

Post 4: Aunt Ida Pieces a quilt

This is a poem written Melvin Dixon, in this poem Dixon talks about AIDS, love and family. He received his PHD from the brown university in addition to teaching at Queens College in New York. He died in 1992 due to complications from AIDS.

This poem starts with an old lady talking about sitting in the hospital where she is given her nieces’ son’s (Junie) cloths who has just passed away. Looking at the “hospital gown, dungarees, his blue choir robe with the white gold sash” (Dixon). She sits and wonders what she should do with all this stuff. Then she talks about her niece’s suggestion that she should quilt as people all over the country are doing that. Again Aunt Ida begins to wonder how she could do something like quilting, she remembers of the many years she tried to quilt and how her mother and her mother’s mother kept correcting her. In this stanza she the readers also realize how old Aunt Ida may be as she talks about how she could not imagine quilting because her eyes are so weak and the way her hands keep locking in a fist.

Yet she starts sewing the quilt, making letters spelling Junie out of each piece of clothing that she had of his. Later she says that as she starts making all this quilt she forgot about her old age and her hands or eyes, she got so busy and involved in remembering her little boy that she knew how happy he might be if he sees this. This is reflected when she says in the second last paragraph that she could almost hear Junie giggle as she sewed her name at the end of the quilt, something she is used to doing since a very young age.

When Francine, the mother of the child comes back and tells Aunt Ida that she is going to send her completed quilt to Washington where it will be kept with a lot more other quilts made in the memory of people who have lost their lives due to such problems.

At the end of the poem, Aunt Ida expresses her opinion about what’s happening in Washington and she wonders how long will this go on. She wonders how many quilts would be sewn together to represent these lives, and will those change what’s happening. She recalls another person who is having a child and again starts looking for her needle.

The end stanza gives a lot of emotion. It kills to think about the effect on the lives of those family members who lose their younger ones due to diseases like AIDS, when Aunt Ida starts looking for her needle at the news of another child being born, it shows how she has lost hope from life and just expects to lose the child again like she has lost Junie.

This poem shows the emotions, the feelings and the after effects of the death of a loved one. While calm the readers can feel the pain going on in the heart of Aunt Ida who has lost the little boy she loved to dearly.

Post 3: Looking For Work – Gary Soto

Gary Soto wrote several poems after discovering poetry in his city college library. Some of his poems have been finalists for both, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. In this story Soto writes form a prospective of a nine year old boy who wants to have a perfect family just like he sees on TV. Soto himself grew up on the industrial side of Fresno, right smack against a junkyard and the junkyards’ cross eyed German shepherd.

The article starts with the nine year old boy sitting in his house watching re runs of the show “Father knows best”, imagining having a life like that. A simple statement made by the author; “the first step was to get my brother and sister to wear shoes at dinner”, shows how involved the boy was in the television shows and how much he wanted to have a life like that. When he sees his family was far from being close to those television families, he feels the need to get rich to lead the life he wants. He grabs a rake and starts trying to earn money raking leaves, but instead ends up delivering coke to a lady who gives him a nickel for the job. He spent the whole morning doing odd jobs hoping to make more money. This boy lived in a very ordinary block of mostly working class people, i.e. warehousemen, mechanics, union plumber, etc…

After a tiring day, the boy decides to go swimming with his best friend and his sister. Upon returning they all sit to dinner with him once again asking his mother about following the family traditions that he sees on the television. He asks her things like having turtle soup one day or starting to dress up for dinner once in a while. Everyone humors him at the idea, but he just remembers how great and comfortable the lives of the “white kids” look on TV.

This article shows the fascination of a nine year old to what he sees on the television every day. Soto remembers how much he wanted to be like the white kids that he forgot the other entire things he did have. By the end of the article he goes out again in search of more jobs to earn even one more nickel and he knows that even that much would just end his day right, because everyone has their own different life and everyone needs to take one day at a time; just like the nine year old boy at that time decided to do.

Post 2: Against School – John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto is an award winning educator and an ardent libertarian, Gatto has taught in New York public schools for more than two decades. He has also been the winner of the New York City Teacher of the Year through 1989 – 1991. He was also named the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Gatto has written several books, i.e. dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling (1992), a different kind of teacher (2000), etc… this article “Against School”, shows Gatto talking about the fake education system that exists in our society.

The title of the article says it all, though he has taught in schools for more than two decades; he is completely against the everyday monotonous work load put on children today. He says in his introduction that “On paper, schools exist to help students realize their full potential, to equip them with the skills they’ll need to achieve success and contribute to society or to foster the development of independence, critical thinking and strong ethical values. But as Gatto sees it, public schools actually exist to fulfill six covert functions meant to cripple our kids”.

Gatto starts the article talking about boredom, he talks about how his grandfather taught him the theory that boredom is self made and if a person truly wishes to do something he would never be bored. He tell the readers how it is important to have ideas, to think of new things to do, to have imagination, because it was these that have raised the many famous personalities we know, i.e. Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller, writers like Melville and Twain who didn’t even complete high school. He says that the education system is designed not to make individuals follow their abilities and excel in life, but to make sure the children remain children all their lives; people who are used to following others and listening to orders.

As the book says the system is designed to fulfill three important purposes; to make good people, to make good criteria and to make each person his/her personal best. Inglis, on the other hand, breaks the system into six of his own criteria which takes the readers away from the three believes listed above. His criteria are; the adjustive and adaptive function, the interrogating function, the diagnostic and directive function, the differentiating function, the selective function and the propadeutic function.  These all talk about the fact that children today are being developed not to become leaders, but followers. The system is shaping them into becoming the labor they wish to see in the workforce in future.

Our education system today lacks the child’s input; we learn by books, computers, what teachers tell us. In order to keep children interested and away from falling into this trap of education, it is important for parents to encourage them to be imaginative and tell them about the world. Keep them included in what’s happening out of the books in which they have their heads in for over twenty years of their lives.

This is a very well presented article which goes in depth of the education today. Gatto was able to make his readers feel the pros and cons of the system and gave clear insight to what is important in the system; it is the children themselves and not the curriculum.

Post 1: From Seven Floors Up – Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds, the author of “From Seven Floors Up”, has written several books of poetry. She teaches at New York University. This poem represents the author looking down at her street observing a poor man and comparing her life to the life of poverty.

She starts the poem painting a picture of the poor man’s condition. “He owns, in the world, only what he has there”; this line emphasises on how poor this man is. He is pushing a shopping cart out of the park; he has no facilities in life. Next, she remembers her trip to the wilderness and all the things she had. As she reaches her motel room complaining about how tired she is; she starts remembering about all the things she had, a shower, a bed to sleep on, etc…

As the readers would read this poem, they can feel how their lives are so complete unlike the poor people who probably dream of these common pleasures that we have every day. She also wonders that her life could never be that way.  I think she is trying to say how after living such a comfortable life we can never truly feel the pain that this poor man is going through. We can never imagine our lives even one third to what he is living. Her last line in the poem, “November, month of my easy birth”, reflects how our lives have always been easy from the time of birth. All our pleasures were introduced to us before we were born.

I think this is an amazing poem that shows us how to appreciate the smaller things in life. We take so much for granted, the water running from our tap, the heat in those cold winter nights, a bed to sleep on, etc… and forget about those other people who live without these comforts, but get through every troublesome day.

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