Within Reading The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

First Generation students dependency on teachers
After completing Essays 1,2 and 3, The central concern that I am focusing on is the dependency of first generation college students on others for knowledge. I want to make this visible because majority of the first generation students population undergoes several obstacles in their life that
Every student has to have someone strong and educated who is so important that without them the student might not be as successful as he or she is now. In every success story of every first generation college student, there is always one great mind behind the other. That one person who gave guidance and is responsible for the knowledge that each student obtain and the journey they took. In this essay, …show more content…
I found it rather disturbing that most First generation college students put their future into the hands of strangers. With nothing but faith and trust these students are forced to depend on their teachers because they have no family member who understands and can help them when it comes to their education. Take Richard Rodriguez for example, he had no one to depend on in such a difficult time of his life, so in hopes of becoming successful he did the only thing he knew at the time and that was to read. Richard Rodriguez depended on his teacher to lead him and teach him the skills he needed to learn. He was a first generation college student with no one in his family to help him with homework or anything, he had to find another way to figure things out. According to Rodriguez in “The Achievement of Desire” “ The night my father tried to help me with an arithmetic exercise, he kept reading the instructions, each time more deliberately, until I pried the textbook out of his hands, saying “ i 'll try to figure it out some more by myself” (Rodriguez 339). This shows that there is more to the problem as to why first generation students usually depend on their teachers. Most of their parents are not educated enough to even assist them in simple high school problems. Students usually avoid depending on their parents because of several reasons. For example, they might be embarrassed of their parents knowledge on the …show more content…
Some are faced with difficulties more extreme than other, but all have very different ways of coping and recovering from it. For example , Richard Rodriguez stated a few ways in which he handled his dependency issues, “ I became tactful, careful to keep separate the two very different world of studies” ( 339). Rodriguez kept his connection with his family and his relations with school very separate from each other. He thought that the best way for him to focus on his education is by paying more attention to what his sources ( teachers) had to say or suggest he do, he did exactly what they wanted him to do. This shows that in order to have a college degree there are sacrifices needed to make despite what your status. However, if you are a first generation college student, you tend to sacrifice more than others. All of this adds on to the fact that when the pressure of school is weighing on the students, it 's more likely for a student to talk to someone who has had experience versus a family member who in this case would be