Social Construction Of Self Reflection

It has only been three weeks and I have never had a class that has personally affected me as much as this one. This week’s reading, “The Social Construction of Unreality: A Case Study of a Family’s Attribution of Competence to a Severely Retarded Child” by Pollner and McDonald-Wilker, really made me question my entire life and the role that my family has had in my education. I am in my second year at UCLA with a full scholarship for tuition and very minimal loans. Granted I have had some ups and downs with my GPA, I have overall been managing my grades. As a student, you can say I have been quite successful. I come from a low-income community. My parents were immigrants from Mexico. I am part of the first generation in my family to go to college. …show more content…
Fifteen years ago, I could not speak. I was four years old and already in kindergarten, but I could not speak. I was diagnosed with autism and for years I went to speech therapy. A specialist would even go to my home once a week to “play” with me. For hours we would sit in the living room and try to name objects. Hours would pass by every week and I never spoke. It was a month before I turned five when I finally said, “ball”. After I began to speak, my doctors dismissed the idea that I was autistic and I was considered to be a healthy child. However, that did not take away the fact that I was very behind throughout grade school. Yet my mother insisted that I should be in the GATE Program and any honors courses that my school offered. Like Mary’s family, my family had the incorrigible proposition that I too was intelligent. In Mary’s case, her “failures were continuously reinterpreted as successes of sorts or else explained away”(CITE). In my case, my failures in academics were acknowledged, but then promptly “fixed”. My parents would sign up to be teacher assistants at my school and ensured that I was getting all the help I needed. If my mother believed that a teacher was not properly teaching me, there would be complaints with the school board and I would promptly be placed in a different class. In high school, I went to over ten hours of tutoring at the local library, on top of my regular studying. I was in summer school every year since I was in the fourth grade. Instead of buying me Barbie dolls for my birthday, my mom would take me to the bookstore and allow me to pick any and all the books I wanted. One year, she even cut the cable so that I could spend more time studying and