Scholarship Boy Richard Rodriguez Analysis

Eureka It has been said that one day, in the bath, Archimedes finally figured out a problem that had been troubling him for some time. After his breakthrough, he is reported running through the streets yelling “Eureka!” Since then, eureka has come to mean a sudden realization or moment of clarity. Both Richard Rodriguez, author of “Scholarship Boy,” and Gerald Graff, author of “Disliking Books,” had a moment like this in their schooling experience. Each went on to become intellectuals with their own habits of mind, or common thinking patterns. Both men wound up at about the same place in their lives, but they have differing habits of mind. Even though both Rodriguez and Graff have their own thinking patterns, they also share some common habits of mind. Rodriguez’s main pattern of mind is best summed up as inquisitiveness. From a young age he was fascinated with learning. His primary reason for learning may not have been for the knowledge itself, however, he was still inquisitive. Learning was something that interested him and he devoted a great amount of time to reading and studying. He often was learning multiple things at a time. This can be seen in “Scholarship Boy” when Rodriguez says that he couldn’t focus on his dissertation because he was …show more content…
Graff was uninterested in books, as the title of his work implies, until he was most of the way through college. His eureka moment only hit when he was asked to read a critique of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Graff enjoyed following the patterns of thought of some of the greatest literary minds as they criticized each other’s work. So, he came to think like those critics. Obviously, Graff’s critical thinking skills should be very advanced since that is what he reads and enjoys. However, an added plus to reading critiques is that one can get into the head of another and think like them. This quality is very useful when trying to decipher multiple