Scholarship Boy Analysis

Introductory Writing Assignment
In the beginning of scholarship boy, Richard Rodriguez starts off lecturing young students whose minds easily become distracted except for one who remains alert and focused and in her of them he sees himself as a child and then begins to reminisce about his own childhood, and how he was a scholarship boy a student anxious and eager to learn but also imitative and unoriginal. Whenever anyone would say “Your parents must be very proud” or ask him how managed it his “success” he would give a quick answer then nod and smile. Although his siblings helped motivate him to become a better student by bringing home trophies that made him envious, as well as his parents would encourage him to do better however they account …show more content…
He would begin to imitate his teachers their mannerisms, even their accents he became a teacher’s pet a “scholarship boy”. He would often be annoyed that he would receive little actual help from his parents due to their lack of proper education and was quickly losing all traces of his Spanish accent. When his father tried to help him with his arithmetic, he only read the instructions and gave no insight into the actual arithmetic problem and then grabbed the book and told his father he would figure it out himself. As he became older and reached the third grade, he acted with more tact and would be more polite towards his parents and would try to choose his words and actions more carefully. There are the scholarship students who come from lower class families and who manage the transition to live in both worlds of home and school quite well, but then there are the scholarship boys who do not manage the transition. A scholarship boy as defined by Richard Hoggart, which Rodriguez based this work off of, is a student who comes from a lower class heritage, initially admiring his parents then wavering allegiance between his education and his family, and thus quickly rises above his lower class status but quickly though perhaps unconsciously abandons his family in his pursuit for …show more content…
However he was not proud of his parents for they did understand or relate to him the way his teachers did. He is so ashamed of his parents he fails to mention to them that had had a received a reward to which they are puzzled but ultimately proud of their son for becoming as good a student as any other. His own father becomes ashamed of his own working class speech when speaking his son’s teacher. When he sees his teacher begin to patronize and condescend on his parents, he realizes how wrong he was for doing so and did not realize their “enormous native intelligence” as he put it, and sees the irony in his actions. But his parents are either ignorant of the fact or do not care for they then jokingly but also truthful say they are proud of their children but that did not receive their intelligence from them to which all parties seem amused and laugh at and even Richard