SDSU Module 2 Memoir: Recalling Personal Experience Essay Please read the Prompt, it disused everything you want to know. Also I uploaded three examples pl
SDSU Module 2 Memoir: Recalling Personal Experience Essay Please read the Prompt, it disused everything you want to know. Also I uploaded three examples plus the prompt. Module 2 Memoir: Recalling Personal Experience
RHETORICAL SITUATION: In your life and career beyond RWS 305W, often you will need to
communicate the significance of various life experiences through descriptive details and important
insights. Whether in a job interview, a profile, a mentorship, a personal statement or networking in
the field, your ability to share life lessons in an engaging way is at the heart of the memoir
assignment. Your audience is an educated readership interested in who you are.
GENRE: Writing a memoir involves memory work; memoirists draw on their pasts, looking back at
events, people, and places that are important to them in order to recreate through written language
moments or episodes of lived experience. Your job is to not just recreate experiences, but to imbue
them with significance readers will understand.
The memoir writer is both participant and observer; the impulse to remember helps remind us of
how we were
Memoir writers take incidents from childhood, focus on moments of revelation,
show how crisis and insights have challenged their perspectives, experiences and values. Memoir
writers write from a desire to bear witness to things that might otherwise have been overlooked or
forgotten. The memoir is an act of self-discovery and also written for the public to read; memoirs
impact the audience in an emotional way.
PROMPT: For this assignment you will recall a person, place or event from your past and write a
memoir. You will need to use details and sensory impression to re-create the moment for your
audience. Your job is to reveal the meaning of the past so that readers understand the significance
the memories hold for the present. Through your writing your audience should be able to visualize
the moment. You should chose to revisit a memory that you have some distance from (not a recent
break-up say, or a current family crisis).
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Consider tensions or conflict from high school or adolescence (Caldwell)
Focus on a past job, special place you used to live, or beloved item you lost (Bragg)
Pick a photo that holds emotional associations and explore a detail that recalls a moment
Select a family ritual or tradition that might be especially important to you
Consider an aspect of your own cultural ancestry (language, food, heirloom) and explain how it has
entered your life and what it reveals about your relationship to your culture.
Focus on some special aspect of your educational experience, a teacher or event (Landry)
Focus on a childhood incident or injury (Walls)
Explain a memorable life lesson or revelation (Yim)
Look through an old journal to find moments when you had your values challenged, had a difficult
decision to make or were disappointed; use the memory as a starting point in which you reflect and put it
in a larger context.
Weight: 20% of your grade
Length: 4-5 pages double-spaced MLA
Timeline: Upload Rough Draft to Turnitin by 9 a.m. on Wednesday 10/2
PeerMark online workshop Wednesday 10/2 from 9:01 a.m. Sunday 10/6 at 11:59 pm
Final draft with Analysis due Wednesday 10/9 by 9:00 a.m.!
ANALYSIS: Marking a section labeled Analysis, include two developed, focused paragraphs at
the end of your memoir that analyze the writing choices and craft elements you specifically
employed; where did you observe them previously, how and why did you implement them, and
what function or effect does it bring to this genre or others?
* Adapted from John Trimburs The Call to Write, 4th edition
I Just Wanna Be Average”
Mike Rose
Mike Rose is a teacher and scholar who, for more than two
decades, has argued quite effectively for the real potential of
students often neglected and undervalued by society. I Just Wanna
Be Average is a chapter from Roses award-winning book, Lives on
the Boundary (1989), about the challenges to and potential of
underprepared students. Rose, himself the child of working-class
Italian immigrants, argues for the unrealized abilities of many
students not well served by our society. Having overcome in high
school his own inadequate preparation and intellectual neglect, Rose
gives us insight into the lives of nontraditional students (often
working class and minority students, ones who have been labelled
remedial) and helps us reconsider our assumptions about them.
It took two buses to get to Our Lady of Mercy. The first started deep
in South Los Angeles and caught me at midpoint. The second drifted
through neighborhoods with trees, parks, big lawns, and lots of flowers.
The rides were long but were livened up by a group of South L.A.
veterans whose parents also thought that Hope had set up shop in the
west end of the county. There was Christy Biggars, who, at sixteen, was
dealing and was, according to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill
Cobb and Johnny Gonzales, grease-pencil artists extraordinaire, who
left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of “Cobb” and “Johnny” on the
corrugated walls of the bus. And then there was Tyrrell Wilson. Tyrrell
was the coolest kid I knew. He ran the dozens1 like a metric halfback,
laid down a rap that outrhymed and outpointed Cobb, whose rap was
good but not great-the curse of a moderately soulful kid trapped in
white skin. But it was Cobb who would sneak a radio onto the bus, and
thus underwrote his patter with Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck
Berry, the Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe’s mother-in-law, an awful woman
who was “sent from down below.” And so it was that Christy and Cobb
and Johnny G. and Tyrrell and I and assorted others picked up along the
way passed our days in the back of the bus, a funny mix brought together by geography and parental desire.
Entrance to school brings with it forms and releases and
assessments. Mercy relied on a series of tests
for placement, and
somehow the results of my tests got confused with those of another student named Rose. The other Rose apparently didn’t do very well, for I
was placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level.
Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant. We had no sense that
Business Math, Typing, and English-Level D were dead ends. The
current spate of reports on the schools criticizes parents for not
involving themselves in the education of their children. But how would
someone like Tommy Rose, with his two years of Italian schooling,
know what to ask? And what sort of pressure could an exhausted
waitress apply? The error went undetected, and I remained in the
vocational track for two years. What a place.
My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and
unstable man who also taught freshman English. When his class drifted
away from him, which was often, his voice would rise in paranoid
accusations, and occasionally he would lose control and shake or smack
us. I hadn’t been there two months when one of his brisk, face-turning
slaps had my glasses sliding down the aisle. Physical education was also
pretty harsh. Our teacher was a stubby ex-lineman who had played
old-time pro ball in the Midwest. He routinely had us grabbing our
ankles to receive his stinging paddle across our butts. He did that, he
said, to make men of us. “Rose,” he bellowed on our first encounter; me
standing geeky in line in my baggy shorts. “‘Rose’ ? What the hell kind
of name is that?”
“Italian, sir,” I squeaked.
“Italian! Ho. Rose, do you know the sound a bag of shit makes when it
hits the wall?”
“No, sir.”
“Wop!.
Sophomore English was taught by Mr. Mitropetros. He was a large,
bejeweled man who managed the parking lot at the Shrine Auditorium.
He would crow and preen and list for us the stars he’d brushed against.
We’d ask questions and glance knowingly and snicker, and all that
fueled the poor guy to brag some more. Parking cars was his night job.
He had little training in English, so his lesson plan for his day work had
us reading the district’s required text, Julius Caesar, aloud for the
semester. We’d finished the play way before the twenty weeks was up,
so he’d have us switch parts again and again and start again: Dave
Snyder, the fastest guy at Mercy, muscling through Caesar to the
breathless squeals of Calpurnia, as interpreted by Steve Fusco, a surfer
who owned the school’s most envied paneled wagon. Week ten and
Dave and Steve would take on new roles, as would we all, and render a
water-logged Cassius and a Brutus that are beyond my powers of
description.
Spanish I – taken in the second year – fell into the hands of a new recruit. Mr. Montez was a tiny man, slight, five foot six at the most, soft-spoken and delicate. Spanish was a particularly rowdy class, and Mr.
Montez was as prepared for it as a doily maker at a hammer throw. He
would tap his pencil to a room in which Steve Fusco was propelling
spitballs from his heavy lips, in which Mike Dweetz was taunting Billy
Hawk, a half-Indian, half-Spanish, reed-thin, quietly explosive boy. The
vocational track at Our Lady of Mercy mixed kids traveling in from
South L.A. with South Bay surfers and a few Slavs and Chicanos from
the harbors of San Pedro. This was a dangerous miscellany: surfers and
hodads and South-Central blacks all ablaze to the metronomic tapping
of Hector Montez’s pencil.
One day Billy lost it. Out of the comer of my eye I saw him strike
out with his right arm and catch Dweetz across the neck. Quick as a
spasm, Dweetz was out of his seat, scattering desks, cracking Billy on
the side of the head, right behind the eye. Snyder and Fusco and others
broke it up, but the room felt hot and close and naked. Mr. Montez’s
tenuous authority was finally ripped to shreds, and I think everyone felt
a little strange about that. The charade was over, and when it came
down to it, I don’t think any of the kids really wanted it to end this way.
They had pushed and pushed and bullied their way into a freedom that
both scared and embarrassed them.
Students willl float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing in pretty shallow water. Vocational
education has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of
students who do not do well in our schools. Some serious programs
succeed in doing that, and through exceptional teachers
students learn
to develop hypotheses and troubleshoot, reason through a problem, and
communicate effectively – the true job skills. The vocational track,
however, is most often a place for those who are just not making it, a
dumping ground for the disaffected. There were a few teachers who
worked hard at education; young Brother Slattery, for example,
combined a stern voice with weekly quizzes to try to pass along to us a
skeletal outline of world history. But mostly the teachers had no idea of
how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at
the bottom of the pond.
And the teachers would have needed some inventiveness, for none
of us was groomed for the classroom. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know
things – didn’t know how to simplify algebraic fractions, couldn’t
identify different kinds of clauses, bungled Spanish translations – but
that I had developed various faulty and inadequate ways of doing
algebra and making sense of Spanish. Worse yet, the years of defensive
tuning out in elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly
while seeming at least half alert. During my time in Voc. Ed., I
developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant problem
solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to
handle: I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with history. My attention
flitted here and there. I fooled around in class and read my books
indifferently – the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I
did what I had to do to get by, and I did it with half a mind.
But I did learn things about people and eventually came into my
own socially. I liked the guys in Voc. Ed. Growing up where I did, I
understood and admired physical prowess, and there was an abundance
of muscle here. There was Dave Snyder, a sprinter and halfback of true
quality. Dave’s ability and his quick wit gave him a natural appeal, and
he was welcome in any clique, though he always kept a little
independent. He enjoyed acting the fool and could care less about
studies, but he possessed a certain maturity and never caused the faculty
much trouble. It was a testament to his independence that he included
me among his friends – I eventually went out for track, but I was no
jock. Owing to the Latin alphabet and a dearth of Rs and Ss, Snyder sat
behind Rose, and we started exchanging one-liners and became friends.
There was Ted Richard, a much-touted Little League pitcher. He
was chunky and had a baby face and came to Our Lady of Mercy as a
seasoned street fighter. Ted was quick to laugh and he had a loud, jolly
laugh, but when he got angry he’d smile a little smile, the kind that
simply raises the comer of the mouth a quarter of an inch. For those
who knew, it was an eerie signal. Those who didn’t found themselves in
big trouble, for Ted was very quick. He loved to carry on what we
would come to call philosophical discussions: What is courage? Does
God exist? He also loved words, enjoyed picking up big ones like
salubrious and equivocal and using them in our conversations -laughing
at himself as the word hit a chuckhole rolling off his tongue. Ted didn’t
do all that well in school- baseball and parties and testing the courage
he’d speculated about took up his time. His textbooks were Argosy and
Field and Stream, whatever newspapers he’d find on the bus stop – from
the Daily Worker to pornography – conversations with uncles or hobos
or businessmen he’d meet in a coffee shop, The Old Man and the Sea.
With hindsight, I can see that Ted was developing into one of those
rough-hewn intellectuals whose sources are a mix of the learned and the
apocryphal, whose discussions are both assured and sad.
And then there was Ken Harvey. Ken was good-looking in a puffy
way and had a full and oily ducktail and was a car enthusiast. . . a
hodad. One day in religion class, he said the sentence that turned out to
be one of the most memorable of the hundreds of thousands I heard in
those Voc. Ed. years. We were talking about the parable of the talents,
about achievement, working hard, doing the best you can do,
blah-blah-blah, when the teacher called on the restive Ken Harvey for
an opinion. Ken thought about it, but just for a second, and said (with
studied, minimal affect), “I just wanna be average.” That woke me up.
Average? Who wants to be average? Then the athletes chimed in with
the cliches that make you want to laryngectomize them, and the
exchange became a platitudinous melee. At the time, I thought Ken’s
assertion was stupid, and I wrote him off. But his sentence has stayed
with me all these years, and I think I am finally coming to understand it.
Ken Harvey was gasping for air. School can be a tremendously
disorienting place. No matter how bad the school, you’re going to
encounter notions that don’t fit with the assumptions and beliefs that
you grew up with – maybe you’ll hear these dissonant notions from
teachers, maybe from the other students, and maybe you’ll read them.
You’ll also be thrown in with all kinds of kids from all kinds of
backgrounds, and that can be unsettling – this is especially true in places
of rich ethnic and linguistic mix, like the L.A. basin. You’ll see a
handful of students far excel you in courses that sound exotic and that
are only in the curriculum of the elite: French, physics, trigonometry.
And all this is happening while you’re trying to shape an identity, your
body is changing, and your emotions are running wild. If you’re a
working-class kid in the vocational track, the options you’ll have to deal
with this will be constrained in certain ways: you’re defined by your
school as “slow”; you’re placed in a curriculum that isn’t designed to
liberate you but to occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you, though the
training is for work the society does not esteem; other students are
picking up the cues from your school and your curriculum and
interacting with you in particular ways. If you’re a kid like Ted Richard,
you turn your back on all this and let your mind roam where it may. But
youngsters like Ted are rare. What Ken and so many others do is protect
themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a
vengeance the identity implied in the vocational track. Reject the
confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common
Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this
bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you – and the others – fear is
beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity,
scientific reasoning, philosophical inquiry.
The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray
matter to make this defense work. You’ll have to shut down, have to
reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to cultivate
stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of
confronting the world. Keep your vocabulary simple, act stoned when
you’re not or act more stoned than you are, flaunt ignorance, materialize
your dreams. It is a powerful and effective defense – it neutralizes the
insult and the frustration of being a vocational kid and, when perfected,
it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful secondary effect. But like all
strong magic, it exacts a price.
My own deliverance from the Voc. Ed. world began with sophomore
biology. Every student, college prep to vocational, had to take biology,
and unlike the other courses, the same person taught all sections. When
teaching the vocational group, Brother Clint probably slowed down a
bit or omitted a little of the fundamental biochemistry, but he used the
same book and more or less the same syllabus across the board. If one
class got tough, he could get tougher. He was young and powerful and
very handsome, and looks and physical strength were high currency. No
one gave him any trouble.
I was pretty bad at the dissecting table, but the lectures and the textbook were interesting: plastic overlays that, with each turned page,
peeled away skin, then veins and muscle, then organs, down to the very
bones that Brother Clint, pointer in hand, would tap out on our hanging
skeleton. Dave Snyder was in big trouble, for the study of life – versus
the living of it-was sticking in his craw. We worked out a code for our
multiple-choice exams. He’d poke me in the back: once for the answer
under A, twice for B, and so on; and when he’d hit the right one, I’d look
up to the ceiling as though I were lost in thought. Poke: cytoplasm.
Poke, poke: methane. Poke, poke, poke: William Harvey. Poke, poke,
poke, poke: islets of Langerhans. This didn’t work out perfectly, but
Dave passed the course, and I mastered the dreamy look of a guy on a
record jacket. And something else happened. Brother Clint puzzled over
this Voc. Ed. kid who was racking up 98s and 99s on his tests. He
checked the school’s records and discovered the error. He recommended
that I begin my junior year in the College Prep program. According to
all I’ve read since, such a shift, as one report put it, is virtually
impossible. Kids at that level rarely cross tracks. The telling thing is
how chancy both my placement into and exit from Voc. Ed. was; neither
I nor my parents had anything to do with it. I lived in one world during
spring semester, and when I came back to school in the fall, I was living
in another.
Switching to College Prep was a mixed blessing. I was an erratic
student. I was undisciplined. And I hadn’t caught onto the rules of the
game: why work hard in a class that didn’t grab my fancy? I was also
hopelessly behind in math. Chemistry was hard; toying with my
chemistry set years before hadn’t prepared me for the chemist’s
equations. Fortunately, the priest who taught both chemistry and
second-year algebra was also the school’s athletic director. Members…
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