The Men We Carry in Our Mind "Thinking about the text"

1.Sanders acknowledges that the bodies of the men he knew were worn out, they were twisted and maimed by the hard labor they went thru everyday. “The nails of their hands were black and split, the hands tattooed with scars. Some had lost fingers” “Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on concrete” p. 56

2.For Sanders, the soldiers were the ones who did not sweat and whose chief fact of life was boredom, the ones who didn’t have a say when or how a battle would be waged, but when the hour killing arrived, they would kill.

3.After living among poor men, who were bound to work as their fathers had worked, killing themselves or preparing to kill others, he couldn’t image growing up to be one of the other type of men, those who were bosses, the savvy lawyers or the generals because that was his boyhood vision of men destinies.

4.Sander’s father’s fate seemed a partial escape from the fate of most men he knew because even though his father went from working on a red dirt farm to a tire company, and from the assembly line to the front office this didn’t mean that everyone would have the same opportunities as his father did and so they were bound to follow the path their fathers had lay for them.

5.According to Sanders, women had “the better life” because they didn’t have to break their backs or had to go to war like the men he knew from his childhood.
6.Since both lower class men and women share the fact of being poor, both of them struggle, men have to break their backs just to get some money while women have to break their heads rationing the money.

7.Sanders wanted to share the power and glory of the fathers of the college educated women just as much as they did, they both wanted jobs worthy of their abilities, for the right to live at peace, unmolested.

Summary Self-Evaluation Blog

The most challenging parts of writing this summary were finding the main ideas in the essay, writing the thesis statement and writing the actual summary. I found these areas to be hard for me because even though I’m a good reader and I can understand for the most part the ideas, in other readings, the author is trying to give us, I had quite some trouble understanding the ideas Tan was trying to her readers. I believe this was because I had never broken down an essay into sections and had to find the main idea in each section. Writing the thesis and the summary itself were also complicated because of my “broken and/or limited English”. I couldn’t find the words to express what I had in mind so I used “simple” words and terms to overcome these challenges to be able to write the summary. Having to follow a certain set of rules made this summary difficult for me so I’m going to have to say that aside from reading the essay everything else was in some ways hard. Honestly, I don’t understand how I got and A- on it, I was actually hoping for a C or a D. For the next summary I’m going to take more time analyzing the reading and thinking about the ideas given by the author and seek help when and/or if I find myself puzzled with the material.

Memorization

The most important memorization technique I learned from chapter 8 would have to be connect because if I can relate to something I already know it’s easier to memorize the new subject or idea that I’m being taught. I also found mark it down and act to be very useful because as kinesthetic learner its easier for me to learn the new subject by writing it down rather than coming up with acronyms which will confuse me later when trying to remember. I think that it depends on the person and/or situation on which technique is more efficient to use. For example, if I want to remember a number or email and I don’t have a pen, paper or something to write the information in I cant act the number, for this scenario I think it would be easier to just try to break the number/email into sections which will make it easier to remember until I can write it down. Each one of us memorizes things differently, so all I can say is to practice on the memorization technique that best suits you.

Libby Blog Response

1.Do the author’s survey results indicate that feminism is, by and large, a dirty word for her fellow students? What in the essay makes you agree or disagree?

By the author’s results I believe that feminism is not a “dirty” word among her fellow students, you can see this in paragraph two where she says “in-fact only one person said that feminism was a bunch of radical women who hate everything about men and blame them for everything bad in the world.” She also stated that most of the people said that feminism was a good thing.

2.What reasons does Libby offer why there are not more self identified feminists?

Many males she talked to said that they couldn’t be feminist because they were male and feminism was only for women, some said that even though they agreed with the ideas of feminism they couldn’t call themselves feminists because they weren’t actively doing anything about it. Also some people said that sexism, sex exploitation and oppression don’t exist in our society anymore. Another reason is the negative connotation attached to the word. Others said that they didn’t care about the issue and one person responded that “titles freak her/him out”.


3.Why does she think more people should identify themselves as feminist?

She thinks that more people should identify themselves as feminist because both men and women are victims of sexism and sex exploitation.

Transfer Motivational Conference

I enjoyed everything about the conference except the workshop. The bus, it was mad funny when Jorge started giving out sandwiches “Tuna or Ham?” I think that the first couple of speakers were alright but then they kept talking and talking and honestly I lost interest in what they were saying. Roll Call, that was the point where I snapped out of my daydreams and got my mind back into the conference. I was really excited to go to the workshop, mine was at the library and I fell in love with it, 5 stories high damn. The workshop speaker was one of the downers from the conference, first of we couldn’t relate to her since she wasn’t an AB540 student, even though she had some points she really didn’t tell us anything new, I was hoping to get some more information about AB540 but nope nothing new. She kept talking about how she thought she wasn’t going to get into Berkeley and how her teacher pushed to her to apply to Harvard and how she did get in, I think that was the highlight of her presentation, having someone push you when you think you can’t and achieving things you would never have thought of. The campus tour was alright, it had been a long day and we were all tired so we all wanted to get it over with. Overall it was a cool experience, seeing new faces, getting closer to the ones you already know. Another downer about the conference was that we couldn’t perform at “Explosion” and we couldn’t even stay to see the other performers.

Anzandula Blog Response #2

Anzandula writes her essay in a non-academic format. The technique she uses is different from an academic essay. She starts it with a metaphor instead of giving the reader a sense of the “larger debate” and the thesis. Throughout the body she lists the many languages she speaks and gives some history behind them, and she quotes Spanish sayings and poems. She divides the body in different section each talking about a specific topic such as music, food, Chicano Spanish, Linguistic terrorism, etc, etc. I think she writes her essay this way in order to show that she feels comfortable using the languages she knows to get the attention of the reader instead, and honestly I think she did a great job because once I started reading it I was hooked. This makes it an anti-academic essay because it doesn’t follow the “rules” for a traditional academic essay. “Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of self inside.” –Kaufman, this quote tells me that she writes her essay this way to prove that she knows who she is and that she doesn’t need to follow a certain technique to reach her readers.

Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" Summary

In the article “Mother Tongue”, Amy tan emphasizes the idea that we all speak different languages unconsciously and that we are categorized by the way we speak. The author is a fictional writer who is “fascinated by language in daily life” and uses language as a daily part of her work as a writer. In paragraphs 2 and 3 she observes experiences that made her realized the different types of "Englishes" she uses. The first time she became aware of this was when giving a talk about her book, The Joy Club, she saw her mother in the audience and she realized that she had been using academic language learned from books, a language she had never used with her mother. The second time she noticed one of her “Englishes” was when walking with her mother and husband, she said “not waste money that way” which for her is an intimate language used only by her family. Her mother’s “broken” English contradicts how much she actually understands, this reminds us that even though her mother’s English seem “broken” it does not reflect her intelligence. Even though her mother was categorized with limited ideas by the people she would to because of the way she spoke tan rejects the idea that her mother English is “limited” or “broken”. She emphasizes the fact that even her mother recognizes that her opportunities and interactions in life are limited by her English. When the author was young she used to have to call people on the phone and act as if she was her mother in order to get people to pay attention to her like when she had to yell at her mother’s stockbroker for not sending a check. In a different occasion when her mother went to the doctor to get the results of a CAT scan, the doctors ignored her when she complained about them losing her results. It wasn’t until Tan talked to the doctor that they apologized and cared to solve the problem. She insists that people not taking a person seriously because of their language can have dangerous consequences. Tan comes to the idea that the language spoken in the family, specially in immigrant families, plays a large role in shaping the language of a child this made her acknowledge that perhaps her family’s language had an effect on her own opportunities in life. For instance in her experience, she notices that Asian students actually do better in math tests than in language tests, and she questions whether or not other Asian students are discouraged from writing or directed in the direction of math and science. Tan changed her major from pre-med to English and she decided to become a freelance writer even though her boss told her she couldn’t write. She eventually went on to write fiction, she celebrates the fact that she did not follow the expectations that people had of her because of her struggle with writing and language. With her mother as an influence Tan decided to write her stories for people like her, people with “broken” or “limited” English.


Like the author I also grew up in an immigrant family who’s English might seem “limited” to others. I sometimes too have to be the spokesperson for my mother and other family members. The idea of people categorizing other people by the way they speak I believe it’s wrong. Unconsciously I have categorize people by the way they speak, both English and Spanish, whenever I hear my mother attempt to speak English I feel as if she is not smart, but then when I’m watching random history or science channels and she tells me her point of view on the whatever I’m watching I realize that she’s actually pretty smart, just like Tan mother’s English seems “broken”, it does not reflect her intelligence. After reading “Mother Tongue” my belief of judging someone by the way they speak has made me stop and think before I put someone down and it has also reminded me of all those times when some of my friends would say something bad about a person because they couldn’t express their ideas or feelings because their language skills were limited.

Anzaldua Blog Response

A couple of friends and I were in a store checking out some stuff and talking. An old lady walked into the store and she stopped and looked at us, we didn’t pay any attention to her, and kept on with our conversation, a couple of minutes later the store manager walked up to us and told us to watch our language because some costumers had complained. We told the manager that we weren’t saying anything bad, then the lady walked into the conversation and said “Yo los escuche usar palabras obsenas”, we asked her to tell us the words and she said that I used the word “wey” a lot and that my friends said others words which honestly I cant remember. I got frustrated trying to explain her that where we came from those words were normal and we use them on a daily basis. She got pissed off out of nowhere because the manager was from a town near ours and knew the words we were using which were not bad at all. She started saying things like “como pueden llamarse asi entre ustedes, esa es una falta de respeto para nosotros los mayores”. I told her “señora porfavor no sea ignorante, ya no estamos en los tiempos de antaño en los cuales todo el mundo hablaba de una forma, cada quien tiene su forma de hablar”. She told the manager that if he didn’t kick us out she was going to call the cops because she felt that we were being disrespectful to her and to other costumers. The manager spoke to us in English and told us that even though he knew that the lady was wrong he didn’t want the cops to get involved in some stupid argument so he asked us to leave. Before we left we told him that it was unfair that we were being kicked out for the way we talked, he apologize and we left.