Bilingual Education: Hunger Of Memory By Richard Rodriguez

In this day in age we are all mutts mixed with various nationalities and roots. At some point in your life your culture doesn’t seem clear. You realize that you are from the United States but you don’t speak English instead you speak Spanish. When you start school you are different you are viewed from classmates as stupid since you go to bilingual classes; Finally you get out of bilingual classes and you feel intelligent and accomplished but now your Spanish starts fading away not on purpose but because your main language is English. Richard Rodriguez’s book Hunger of Memory depicts his own childhood being of Hispanic decent and details his educational experiences. Rodriguez states that his success in education is due to his parents. The reasons …show more content…
I myself have felt the need to prove to my parents that I can be the ‘best’ student/daughter there is. I felt this because my parents would always get frustrated when I did something wrong. Like when I failed at simple tasks like multiplication or just pronounced something wrong, I would feel my ears just buzzing with words of failure. Accidents like those made me want to be one of the A students, one of the best just to prove to my parents what I was capable of. I see myself in Rodriguez because he felt this irrational anger towards his parents for disconnecting him of his roots through the use of education. Similar to him, I felt this anger with my parents for disconnecting me of a childhood. Yet at this moment I feel like all anger is gone because I became the person I am today do to this drive of emotion. Now in adulthood Rodriguez notices the anger he had was just an emotion that was misread, an emotion that changed his life …show more content…
It was reading that Rodriguez hated because it made him “feel all alone”. It completely isolated him from everything, for example from his family. It was one of his greatest fears since it was the way that Rodriguez was left alone with his thoughts. Reading then became his friend because even with this isolation books gave him answers and conversation that others denied. His family pushed him to this life of success in education yet mocked him for reading in a closet. The denial that was given was because nobody understood him no more. Although this issue was present Rodriguez used the motivation of his anger to continue his path of being ‘educated’. I as Rodriguez hate to be alone with my thoughts. Thus I keep moving and distracting myself with either other people’s problems or just by trying to be the daughter that my parents want. You can say Rodriguez maybe just felt the need to show that emotion is something that can hurt and help