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Introduction:

My goal for this essay is to have others who read it understand me and how it is that I was able to learn how to speak the same language that they do. I’m extremely proud of my first paragraph because it’s the part that describes how I felt when I was 5 years old. I’m proud that my language barrier was demolished and that this allowed me to connect it to literacy. In the future, I plan to go to lit lab in order to have it better peer reviewed.  

The Language Obstacle

It’s difficult to understand and try to learn a new language when you’re accustomed to something else and were taught it growing up. It’s also difficult when at home your family only knows 1 language, so they only speak to you in that tongue. Since they only speak 1 language, they can’t help you with your homework because they themselves don’t know what the paper says. They’re going at the same pace as you because they have to learn it with you because they have to apply it to their daily lives in order for them to be able to communicate as well. The only people you can rely on are your teachers and any additional outside resources, when all of your other classmates can rely on their family members. Once something is taught in class, your classmates can go home and just ask their parents for help because they’ve already learned this. Meanwhile, you go home to be just as confused as your parents, having to go bother your neighbors for help.

This was was I had to go through when I was in Pre-K, about 12 years ago. I was born in California, and there I attended school where people spoke. Once we came here to Philadelphia, school was very different because everyone spoke English. My parents enrolled me into a Catholic School, and when I started school, I had no clue as to what the teachers were saying. Everything they said to me sounded gibberish, I was getting lost in whatever the teachers assigned for homework because I didn’t understand them they taught it in class.

I remember what a typical day after school looked like for me. At 2:50, the bell would ring, announcing to the students that the school day was over and everyone was allowed to go home. I would walk outside, waiting to see my mom’s round face, smiling at me, taking me by the hand and telling me that we would be going to the library. All of my friends would say,

“I can’t wait to go home and watch tv,”

“I can’t wait to go home and play video games!”

Meanwhile, in my mind I would say, “I can’t wait to go to the library,” in a sarcastic tone. My mom and I would walk down to the library, from about 3 to 6:30, staying there just to ask others there for help. I would feel so shy and kind of embarrassed because I felt stupid for not knowing English. I would pick out graphic novels, just because they mainly consisted of pictures, so I could easily follow along with the words. After we got our help, or sometimes didn’t, when the homework helpers weren’t there, we’d go home and ask our neighbor for help. My mom would go knock on her door and with her broken English ask,

“Can you help my daughter?”

Our neighbor would smile and always tried her best to explain it to me and my mom because my dad was often absent because he was always working long hours. At the end it all paid off because I graduated being the only one that knew how to read. At the end a lot of the parents and teachers came up to me to say that they were really proud of me because they’d known how much I’d struggled. All of my hard work and efforts finally paid off, from this, I was able to teach my younger siblings English and when they came to me for help, I was able to help them because in a way, it was my way to giving back to those who helped me.

I would practice the English I was taught, just so that I could prove that I wasn’t the typical Mexican who knew very little English. There’s always been this expectation that in order for someone to succeed here in the U.S they have to know how to speak English, which I believe was a main reason for why my mom was so hard on me when I was little. “‘I want you to speak English. Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien. Que vale toda tu educación si todavía hablas ingles con un ‘accent.’’ my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican.” Gloria Anzaldúa writes about how there’s always been something set on us, that if we speak with an accent, then people will judge us and not want to give us a job.

Sometimes I feel insecure with my English because I feel that people will think that since I’m Mexican, it justifies why I can’t speak it well. There’s this expectation that I have for myself which is that I can’t mess up when speaking English because I don’t want to show that “weakness” that I ever had a struggle of understanding/learning English. As Amy Tan says, “Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.” I believe that my parents influenced me in a way that I was forced to learn this language, they set me up to succeed, because they knew how hard it was for them as adults.

Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford, 7th ed., Pearson, 2010, pp. 34-44.

Introduction

In this paper, I aimed to present similarities between music and common forms of literacy. I am proud of the points I was able to make. I need to work on being more concise because I struggled with the word limit even though I had already cut out a lot of content.

Advanced Essay

Going into middle school, I knew the very basics of music. I could sight read simple pieces, play scales, and recognize some intervals. Over the next four years, I studied music theory, learning about different aspects that go into a seemingly simple musical sentence. The elements of rhythm and melody and what falls underneath them; endless note values and time signatures, overwhelming scales, modes, intervals, and harmonies. Combining these pieces creates infinite possibilities in only one bar. Combining bars together then creates unique lines, which can be used to construct a piece. What Sherman Alexie said of paragraphs in The Joy of Reading and Writing can be said of musical lines; “A paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose” (Alexie, 12). If a note with a rhythm and a tone is equal to a word, then a bar is a sentence, a line is a paragraph, and a piece is a story. Music theory is the grammar of musicality.

When one thinks of types of literacy, books, articles, languages, and similar subjects usually come to mind. These sorts of literacy provide examples of the different ways literacy is used. I will be looking at a few different pieces that are used for communicative, personal, or both purposes.

Communication can be argued to be the primary purpose of literacy. Letters, texting, and emails provide simple interactions. Larger pieces of literacy, like papers and books, are meant to be read by other people and are therefore types of communication. In a piece of music, there is a transfer of information, often through a story being told. Such a story or scene is brought to life by emotions and atmosphere that the composer creates. Knowing theory helps a composer use the tools to reach for these emotions more effectively. Communication through music also extends to the way it is performed. Just as a word can have different connotations depending on the way it is said, a single note can be played a multitude of ways that are limited only by the instrument itself. Depending on the way a piece is written, certain liberties are up to the performer, bringing forth unique versions of the same piece, as the performer chooses how they want to interpret it.

In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan speaks on the power of language, that it can “evoke emotion, a visual image, a complex, idea, or a simple truth” (Tan, 1). I would say that The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi does all of these things. The Four Seasons is a well-known work, comprised of four concertos, each representing a different season. When listening, one can actually feel each season. In Spring, Vivaldi begins with bouncy and clear melodies played by a lead violin. Summer is fuller, with more of the orchestra and harpsichord filling in and creating an adventurous feeling, which progresses into Autumn, featuring a slightly brighter and more neutral theme. There is no way to describe the sound of Winter other than crisp, like the feeling of stepping on fresh snow. The way Vivaldi and the performers use music brings forth a quite clear narrative of changing nature through each distinct section.

Besides communication, another common use of literacy is personal. Many people choose to keep journals or diaries to record their thoughts and emotions. Some use creative forms of writing, like poetry, to express their feelings, or get something off of their chest. Listening to music can have the same effect. Some people listen to music to fall asleep or relax. Some use it to get fired up for a workout. Some depend on music that they can relate to. When I was in middle school, I spent a lot of time listening to the alternative band Twenty One Pilots. Their music largely focuses on living with illnesses like anxiety and depression, and I was drawn to them because of this. I remember spending nights shut in my room in the dark, listening exclusively to TOP on repeat. Although it seems crazy and cliche, their music made me feel safe at a time in my life when very little did. I depended on their songs for comfort and something to connect with when I was too timid to talk to anyone about my problems.

Music is a versatile form of literacy that everyone uses in various ways to accompany various aspects of life. When considering concept albums like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, that are chock full of social commentary, masterpieces like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, that showcase musical creativity and talent, or historical songs like Hirsh Glik’s Zog Nit Keynmol, (inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising), that document suffering and pain, it is easy to see the many forms music can take and the functions it can have. These functions differ more than they overlap with those of The Four Seasons or the songs of Twenty One Pilots, and thus it becomes apparent that music is one of the most multifaceted and important literacies we know.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman, “Superman and Me: The Joy of Reading and Writing.”

Tan, Amy, “Mother Tongue”

Introduction

This essay is about sensitivity in society today and the silencing of literacy today. People are too scared to speak their opinion because people keep telling them its offensive and through this essay I had explained the ideas which surround the silencing of people. This had been the goal, to portray this idea to the world. One thing I am proud of is the analysis on the quote and I think it had been used well and supported my argument clearly. Improvements for my essay in the future, I would like to have a better written, stronger scene. I think that it is the section which needs the most work.

Advanced Essay

As a child, I had grown up in a majority white neighborhood and went to a majority white elementary school. Then I had changed schools in middle school and suddenly, half of my new class had been African American. This was a new experience for me and I didn’t really know what to do. I could tell they had been different from me in appearance but I still didn’t know if they had been different from me in any other way. I was still innocent at the time and more curious than I should have been.

   We had been watching a movie in class and there had been a short scene where this little boy a been pretending to be this gangster with his friend and I didn’t know why they would want to act like that. After the movie, I had raised my hand and asked my teacher, “Why are those kids acting like thugs cause I had thought that thugs weren’t supposed to be good people?”

   The response that my teacher gave had been some kind of nonsense about kids imagination which I as a kid bought but the key thing that I remember from that day is this kid from across the classroom calling out, “They were trying to act black.” To this day I don’t know who it was but what I do know is what my teacher did in response to it was not the right thing.

   “Be quiet, and don’t say something like that ever again,” with a stern and serious look on his face. I was scared. I thought it had simply been an attempted joke but according to my teacher is was like forbidden language. Today I understand the comment had been racist but when I was a child, I didn’t get the explanation I needed.

All throughout middle school I remembered living is worry that I might say something about black people that may offend them. It was hard because I didn’t understand what was right and what was wrong so my choice was just to stay silent. Not a single word had come out of my mouth whenever anything about black people had come up.

If you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say it. 

Every student hears this in school but what defines something as not nice. Something you say to one kid may mean something else to another kid. The only things this statement does is silence students and instill fear into them that language isn’t free to speak and thought is not free to think. This idea poisoned me and still poisons the lives of students all over the US.

In the story How to Tame a Wild Tongue, they had been talking about how you cannot adopt an accent into a language but instead, you must get rid of it all together and the author makes the claim, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,”(Anzaldúa). When people are offended by a specific phrase, they aim to suppress it or ban it all together. As more and more thing become considered “offensive” by society, we will have a world full of mute men and women who dare not to say a word. When relating this quote to this theme, it states we cannot control the use of offensive language, we must discard it and language cannot be discarded. Every word has to mean, and to every person, that meaning is different. As a society, we should understand that that words spoken should not be taken in our own perspective but in the speaker's perspective.

The easy choice is to be silent, the harder decision is to speak.

It does not take a lot of effort to sit in a classroom quietly all day and then at the end of the day just leave and go home. It takes courage and strength to speak about what your opinions and what you believe it. Instead of focusing how some words offend you, you should focus on the message they are trying to get across. Show compassion and empathy for them and put yourself in their shoes. It is not easy to raise your hand and confidently speak to the class. Any teacher would prefer to hear people’s unique perspectives rather than nothing at all.

The world is slowly becoming silenced and slowing our growth as a society. People’s sensitivity is driving this silence which is putting our advancement as a society to a stalemate. People should speak their opinion, every opinion should be heard no matter the topic, and those opinions should be understood rather than silenced. This is the only way we will progress as a society.

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Introduction

The goal of my essay is to explain how one’s identity is a literacy and how stereotypes based on predictions affect how one views their own identity as well as other people's identity. The essay goes more into depth about sexuality specifically.  The part of the essay that I am most proud of is the third paragraph down. I could improve on allowing my ideas to flow better.

Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover

My hands were swinging by my side, the air was cold and there was snow on the ground. The street was loud, booming with crowds of people. I thought that maybe I had heard it wrong. My mind raced with the possibilities of what he could have said, hoping he said something different, praying, as I heard the words run through my brain. The words he spoke tainted the image that I had of him, more than I could have ever imagined.

I was happy not knowing the gleeful ignorance of his misunderstanding when he exclaimed the words “I would not have sex with a bisexual person because of sexually transmitted diseases.” My stunned response led to more rude comments that I would have never expected, unveiling ridiculous stereotypes of a bisexual person, statements such as bi people are whores, and questioning why bisexual people can not commit, or why they cannot choose between heterosexuality and homosexuality.  This is normal for me; my friends and people around me making homophobic, or just generally offensive, jokes at my expense and expecting me to laugh as if my feelings do not matter. It was a few years ago, but the voice still stings in my head, the words, while not important to him, changed the way that I spoke my language.  

The stereotypes that are ingrained in our society allow people to judge a book by its cover, determining one’s value by looking at the outside cover without reading the inside.  People give these stereotypes no second thought, living and breathing based on the judgements that they make.   There is nothing wrong with the judgements, but people can go above and beyond those two dimensional images. It is when you force any one person into the stereotypes where the problem comes up. Forcing people into set images separates them from their identity.

Each person's identity is a language that each person speaks, but it's more than the actual words, it is also made up of the actions, the ideas, and the visual representations of the person. The combination of these aspects is what makes up a person's individual language.

The following quote by James Baldwin in his work, If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? reinforces the idea that people’s language is what makes up their identity and creates the image that people see.  “It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”  The way people communicate and interact  are tainted by the outside world, the way people look at them and the way you look at yourself are shaped by the the words and views of other people. They can not speak their language because people do not understand it.  

Sexualty is not on a lever where you can switch it from straight to gay, there is a sliding bar of sexualities. Each person fits somewhere on the scale. The people who do not see and understand this look at the world as a black and white image, the vivid color of each person's identity is drained from their view.  It is no different than the different languages people speak. Some people speak English, others speak Spanish and people are judged by how they speak by different groups.

Some people believe that repeated slurs can change a person's perspective of themselves. This can be seen in Gloria Anzaldua’s work, How to Tame a Wild Tongue in the quote,  “Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self.”  It is acceptable to speak a commonly known language that people can learn and understand, but as soon as it's not easy for the majority of people to understand, it is deemed wrong. People may correct those mistakes and attach negative ideas to that correction. Being prejudged and berated erodes a person’s identity of themselves, it creates a society where people are ashamed to speak a language that is not seen as normal. That feeling of the lack of normality leads to the more negative effects, creating a never ending cycle.

Work Cited

James Baldwin,nytimes,New York Times,July 29, 1979,http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html,

Accessed Dember 8. 2017

Gloria Anzaldua,everettsd,Borderlands = La Frontera.,1987,https://www.everettsd.org/cms/lib07/WA01920133/Centricity/Domain/965/Anzaldua-Wild-Tongue.pdf,Accessed December 8. 2017

My paper is about the ways in which we speak differently around certain people and why. I hope to shed light on how society has expectations for how we act in public and how we bend those unspoken recommendations around the people with whom we are closest. I am proud of how I believe I gave people an insight to who I am as well as what I believe is expected from me. I wish that I had included examples of how I deviate from societal norms with my friends in addition to just my family.

The Difference In Our Words

I change how I communicate when I interact with different groups of people. In particular, I speak differently. I change what I say, when I say it, and how I say it. This is true for most people, because we learn when it’s important to follow societal norms and when it’s acceptable to push those boundaries.

Cursing is something that most people do only in particular circumstances. While I am the same way, unlike many others I curse around my parents, who are mostly ok with it as long as I do it with a smile on my face so that they know I’m not serious or angry. Many other times, though, I know to hold my tongue and speak properly and with decorum.

Back in September, my Dad and I were at our friend’s house watching the Eagles game. As school had just begun, the group -- mostly made up of forty-something year-old Dads -- was discussing the pleasures of kids being back in school.

The host explained, “It’s nice to have them in bed at a reasonable hour. All summer, they were just banging around the house at all hours of the night.”

My Dad, sarcastically pretending that I wasn’t sitting right next to him, stated, “It’s amazing to have Leo back in school. I believe we had more than enough time to bond this summer.”

My response was already at the tip of my tongue. It would have been so natural, and so satisfying, to have released the words, “Fuck off.” It wouldn’t have been anywhere near the first time that I had said it, and I don’t believe that’s a bad thing. As Robert Klein explains, “I’m not against profanity. It’s an important part of the language when used properly.” Cursing is not just a way to express anger towards someone, but a way to strengthen a bond between people and to add humor. While I would have been comfortable saying these words to him with a smile if it were just the two of us, I restrained myself due to our present company. Some people might not have understood my sarcasm and would have taken it as me not respecting my Dad. Society creates expectations about how we are to act, and while we all strive to be our authentic selves, we also have to learn about the importance of operating inside society’s norms and therefore when and to what extent we should express ourselves in different ways sometimes.

Jokes are one of my favorite ways to express myself, but I have to be careful about what I say depending on to whom I’m talking. There is a fine line between what is funny and what is considered offensive. Many times it is hard to know where that line is, because it is different for each person based on how well we know each other.

For the last five years I have only rarely called my sister by her name Rebecca. Instead, I call her Tubby Bear Junior or some variation of it such as TBJ, Tubs, or Junior. Now while the Bear and Junior parts of her nickname are acceptable for all audiences, Tubby is a name that refers to someone who is overweight, which in a nickname would normally be thought of as derogatory. In this case, though, due to my closeness with my sister and our common understanding that not only is she not fat but in fact is fit and athletic, the nickname is just an ironic joke. It reflects how close we are to each other.

This is the type of joke that you can only make to someone with whom you are very close. I would never call any of my friends by a nickname that referred to them as overweight or anything related to body image, which can be such a sensitive topic. But with my sister it is ok because she is in on the joke and interprets it as the affectionate nickname that it is.

Just like many other people, I conform to society’s norms most of the time. The only times that I feel comfortable stepping outside what is considered typical is when I’m with people that I am very close with and who know my personality. It is not typical for a child to curse in front of his parents or to have a nickname for someone that contains derogatory language, but due to the bond I have with my family and also with my closest friends I am able to push society’s communication norms with that limited group of people. Pushing these norms not only allows me to express myself in the way I sometimes like to, but it also helps create and strengthen the bonds I have with these people.

“Robert Klein Quotes.” BrainyQuote, Xplore, www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_klein_678411.

Literacy, specifically in terms of the ability to read and write, is an essential part of one’s education. Reading is especially important as without being able able to read, one cannot hope to be able to write. One’s ability to read determines one’s ability to better perceive the world around them as the vast majority of our information is presented in a written format. Thus, the sooner one learns to read, the sooner one can begin to truly learn about the world they live in.

I was a rather fortunate child in this regard as I learned to read at a notably early age compared to most children. From as early as I could remember, my parents had been reading me stories which I would listen to with a sort of obsessive focus, which says a lot as I can rarely focus on any one thing for an extended period of time. By the time I was three years old, I was attending a preschool at which I was being taught how to read and write. We started with basic subjects like pronouncing letters and writing our names. While the teaching was effective, it seemed to move too slowly for young me as I craved more. As I was an ambitious child, I decided to teach myself to read. First, I had to find the right book. It had to have enough words to be challenging, while still being a relatively light read. I settled on one of my favorite dinosaur books. It was quite large with full page illustrations and a few sentences per page. It was perfect.

I set about my task in secret, not wanting to risk my parents offering their assistance. This was something that I knew had to be done entirely on my own. Each night, after going to bed, I would stay up for several minutes attempting to decipher the pages. I sat hunched over the book under my covers with a flashlight as to not disturb my brother nearby. The process was slow and arduous as each page took me several minutes to complete and I was constantly sidetracked by the illustrations. Still, I pressed onward, each page becoming slightly easier than the last. By the end of the fourth night, the book was finished. From then on, my reading quickly improved as I seemed to outpace the rest of the class. While others would play, I would find a spot to sit and read. Since then, I have always been at an advanced reading level. I don’t mean to brag, but this was extremely helpful in the earlier years of school.

Literacy is one of, if not the most valuable forms of cultural capital. The ability to read is necessary in society for finding and absorbing information. It allows one to learn independently as they can seek out information without the need for someone to explain it to them. However, if one is deprived of this ability, than they lose a great deal of their independence and makes them much easier to control. For example, slaves were absolutely forbidden from reading or writing as keeping them illiterate made them incapable of arguing for their rights. While a slave could find evidence of the wrongfulness and immorality of their enslavement, they would never be able to because they weren’t capable of obtaining that information. All they knew was what was told to them by their masters, who used this to better control them. This is how Frederick Douglas managed to escape slavery because he taught himself how to read and write. Similarly, in the segregation era, black schools were deprived of resources in order to better control the students. Without being told about the importance of literacy, many of these children never pursued it later in life and so never developed the skill further. In The Apartheid of Children’s Literature, Christopher Myers states “As for children of color, they recognize the boundaries being imposed upon their imaginations, and are certain to imagine themselves well within the borders they are offered, to color themselves inside the lines.” When it comes to children’s literature, books for children of color simply aren’t published. This indirectly deprives them of a way to improve their own literacy skills and, by extension, their knowledge of the world around them.

While literacy has always been an essential life skill, its importance hasn’t been stressed until quite recently. People are only just beginning to realize how much one’s literacy skill determines and what they can do to improve. Hopefully, people can have more access to literacy instruction in order to close a gap that has existed in society for centuries.

Works Cited

Introduction:

My goals for this paper is to share how visual literature changed how I viewed myself. I’m most proud of the flow of my writing. I could improve in making my thoughts on literature more clear

Women and Visual Literature:

I was sitting on the bed in my mom’s room. She was folding and putting away laundry while the T.V. was on. The T.V. screen was playing some sort of crime show. In the show, there was a man and a woman standing in a gritty city. The man offered a bouquet of roses to the woman. The woman laughed and walked away from the man, refusing his proposal. The woman didn’t get too far before the man shot her to death despite her pleas for him to stop. The woman’s body was left in the streets while the man drove away from the crime scene with his unwanted bouquet of flowers.

That scene gave me a fear of rejecting people and saying no. I grew more cautious of how much authority people have over me and how quickly and drastically I would be punished if I didn’t do what was expected of me. An article by UNICEF states that,  “... exposure to media among youth creates the potential for massive exposure to portrayals that sexualize women and girls and teach girls that women are objects.” Although the media I was exposed to was not sexual, the effect was the same. That scene gave me the idea that I should be afraid of men as well as the power that they had and I lacked. I had the expectation that when I would enter my teen and adult years I had to make the men around me pleased with my answers and behavior even if I would not be comfortable with the outcome. Without even knowing it at the time I was beginning to understand my role in society was to be objectified. Visual literature helped me realize how I was expected to behave and perceive myself. My perspective on what I could be as a woman narrowed down to one option; an object designed to please men.

When I was in elementary school I would spend my time during recess playing make believe on the playground. At times I was the only girl in a group of boys, making me have to take on the more feminine characters in our made up adventures. One recess we decided that we would play in the world of Star Wars. Despite the fact that I hadn’t seen any of the movies at the time, I would always get assigned the role of Princess Leia. The obvious reason was because I was the only girl that would play this game with them. However, my friends claimed it was because of the curly buns I had on the sides of my head. They would pretend to be Jedis and use “the force” to move things as well as have fierce fights with imaginary lightsabers. My job was to mostly sit and watch. On more eventful days I could pretend to be in danger until it was time for me to be saved by my friends.

Looking back on my times spent in the playground I realize that my roles have always been passive. The nature of the characters I would play did not matter. My male friends and I did not care if the women I pretended to be were strong leaders or highly intelligent. In our eyes, these characters were only girls and nothing more. Often times in the media, shows will have a singular female character in a group of men. In an article titled “Hers; The Smurfette Principle” Katha Pollitt defines the Smurfette principle as, “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined.” Pollitt also gives examples of female characters who only have one singular personality trait. Kanga from Winnie the Pooh is the mother of the group while Miss Piggy from The Muppets only exists as a “glamour queen”. Pollitt comes to an understanding and begins to see that, “Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.”  Visual literature has shown me that women are seen as singular traited individuals that exist only to levitate the qualities of men. This representation of woman in visual literature has caused children, like me and my friends, to dismiss the idea of women having larger roles. Women are put in a position where they must prove that they are too complex to just be accessories to the characteristics of men.

Eventually, I realized that I am too multifaceted to be reduced to an object. Despite visual literature introducing harmful stereotypes in the past  I believe it’s steadily improving. Every day I see better representations of gender and I hope children today are gaining higher perceptions of themselves.

Works Cited:

“Not An Object: On Sexualization and Exploitation of Women and Girls.” UNICEF USA, 9 May 2016, www.unicefusa.org/stories/not-object-sexualization-and-exploitation-women-and-girls/30361.

Pollitt, Katha. “Hers; The Smurfette Principle.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Apr. 1991, www.nytimes.com/1991/04/07/magazine/hers-the-smurfette-principle.html.

I ended up missing my designated presentation time but that doesn’t mean that the criticism I received was any revered.

The main point of criticism for my slide was the fact that there was a lack of font and the photo was not as front-and-center as it should have been. In order to fix this I played around with fonts until I found the font, “Bungee Hairline” which is what I chose to be my final font due to its bold yet thin lettering and minimalistic aesthetic. I also cropped the photo and eliminated the section of the paper that had a bit of pencil scribble on it as that was distracting and took away from the overall clean look of the slide.

The reason why I aimed for an overall simple look was due to the fact that most of my research said to take advantage of large font and open space as well as the lines of focus. So I thought that the best way to achieve all three of those goals was to one, place my drawing in the center of the slide, two, make sure that it had equal borders on all sides, and three, only place bold font on the left side of the slide therefore taking advantage of one of the horizontal lines of focus while also leaving open space. In conclusion, the goal of my slide is to both simply and effectively convey the change that I have gone through both physically and emotionally throughout the course of my life and I believe, thanks to the power of design, I have been able to achieve this.

The Language of Masculinity:

When I was fourteen I entered the workforce with my first job, which was anything but glamorous. I was condemned to spend a little more than a month of my summer trapped in a very old and hot gym with a gaggle of small children. While the children were annoying, it was my fellow coworkers who I found to be the most unbearable.

I have this complex when it comes to interacting with guys my own age. I do not consider myself to be overly masculine in the slightest, so I find myself feeling lost and mildly annoyed at the behavior of my fellow men. Not all men, but just the majority of them who flaunt their masculinity and force it onto others. The ones who find ways to insult not only each other but different groups of people as well.

The camp in which I worked seemed to reinforce stereotypical gender norms much to my dismay. Me and the rest of the boys were in the gym playing sports with the older kids while the girls were confined to the “tot room” watching over the smaller campers.

Lunches, where all of us guys would sit in the break room, were the worst for me. Conversation would buzz around me, but it was as if the guys were speaking a foreign language that I barely had a grasp of. I had mastered the art of nodding along and laughing in order to pass as just another guy, but every now and then though one of them would say something that snapped me to my senses.

“Dude stop being such a faggot,” I had heard one of them yell.

“Shut up, you’re the faggot,” another had retorted, his mouth full of sandwich. They all laughed except me. I always hoped that no one would notice my flinch when they said certain words like faggot or retard. Those were words of their language that I had refused to speak.

It had always fascinated me that men use the term faggot as an insult, as if being gay would  suddenly strip a man of what makes him a man. It seems as though men are obsessed with the concept of a fag, which is to say an overly feminine and flamboyant man who likes men. It must make them feel better about their own fragile masculinity.

To me, masculinity is a language in itself. It is one born from years of privilege and entitlement, of aggression and hate. It not only harms those who are not men, but it also harms the men who use it.

As Steve Almond wrote in his article What I Learned in the Locker Room, “We look to pro sports as a reminder that it is our duty to conceal the parts of ourselves that feel vulnerable, the parts we associate — erroneously, but inextricably — with the feminine.”

Hypermasculinity not only harms those who are not men, but it also harms the men who perpetuate it. The fear of being feminine or the fear of being a “fag” is what drives men to act the way in which they do.

Men conceal their feelings, their vulnerabilities, and repress them until there is no other choice but to push those negative feelings onto others. It makes sense then, that they would attack the so-called “faggots” because they are jealous of a man who can take ownership of who he is and who can take responsibility for his emotions and actions. “Faggots” are a threat to their way of life.

Towards the end of my first summer of work, I found myself exhausted keeping up the charade of masculinity. I think the facade that I had put up began to fade because one boy reached out to me during my last week of work. We were in the gym, and he had stopped me in the middle of my weak attempt at shooting some baskets.

“I just wanted to tell you that I notice how uncomfortable you seem around some of the other guys, I get it,” he admitted. “I just don’t want you to think that I’m a horrible person because of how I act around them. I’m not like this really, I just do it to fit in,” he had told me.

I think I replied with something along the lines of, “Yeah don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal,” but in reality I was confused. Why did this boy care so much about what I thought of him?

The answer didn’t come to me until much later, after I had become more comfortable in my own skin. He was trying to reassure me that he was not a “horrible” person, but in reality it seemed as though he was trying to reassure himself, which makes me think about what Gloria Anzaldúa emphasizes in her work How to Tame a Wild Tongue, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.”

This boy had given up who he was in order to fit into the male archetype. He took the parts of himself that were against the norm and cut them out in order to become what every man is expected to be. While he may have found comfort in the conformity, he had lost himself in the process of doing so. I came to realize that you cannot bargain with society, you either speak the language it wants you to or you risk becoming a social pariah.

Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Almond, Steve. What I Learned in the Locker Room. The New York Times Company, 11 Sept. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/what-i-learned-in-the-locker-room.html. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

As my friends and I were talking about the class reading that we had to do for Mr. Kay's class. We were talking about the main character in the book and what we thought about her. As we walked, we were talking about the character choices in the book. I was telling them that I thought that the character actions were too impulsive to make any sense. As I told them that they gave me a look of confusion and giggles. I asked what happened. And all they said was what is the character name. ¨Why her name is Dane¨” everyone laughed with the laughter filling the halls ¨ẅhat did I say, that's her name¨. ¨Her name is Dana, You know that right¨ I looked at them thinking that they're crazy because I knew that I said. ¨You said Diane you know that right¨  as I looked at them I said ¨ Ya I guess¨. I went through that day not truly know what I said wrong but I know that the reason why they didn't fully understand me was that of my speech and dyslexia. The knowledge of know that your being affected by something that you can't change about yourself. I know that I am not the only one effect by a speech in their everyday lives. The short story Mother Tongue  It illustrates the struggle of a mother who is trying to live her everyday life with working, finances and raising a child, and dealing with the knowledge that she will not be fully understood and taken seriously because of her ability to speak English. “I knew from a four fact because when I was growing up, my mother’s ‘limited’ English limited my perception of her”(2). This ideal of speech impacts someone's ability of taken seriously is something that many people have to face in their everyday life with people with speech people are being less likely to be hired over other people. This practice can not only affect business body with them not hiring the best person for the job because they don't speak perfectly but instead picking people that might not be qualified and cause them to lose financially.

Cultures around the world have dictated their version of success in their society with people who ability took and speech a certain part leads them to be more successful in their society. Thru their eyes they cherry picking people that will be able to compete in the world to make them look more smart and intelligent.  The Idea of only picking people that looks and sound like the part cause them to overlook smarter and brighter people because they are different. This Practice not only limits the society as a whole by not putting their best foot forward in the areas of ideas, jobs, and knowledge. But it's also limit the society in another way. Its limit people experience and culture with them suppressing there difference and accents it fixes the average way people speak. As a society, we need to think and talk about if we want this to be the process of people being accepted into a job. If as a society we are comfortable with that we need to ask why. Why are we comfortable with allowing a part of our population that percentage numbers in the double-digit not being able to be heard or taken seriously.  That the real question that everyone should be asking themselves and that will people with claim different causes are more moral the ideals that anyone forms any background cannot listen be the cause of the way that they speak is something that we all need to acknowledge and do something about because for more people it´s unchangeable.

Literacy is a part of life that many people underestimate. When any form of literacy is left out of the curriculum, people forget it. It becomes something they no longer pay attention to, and when mentioned, its gets degraded into oblivion. But literacy is really something great. It does in fact play a huge part in our lives, and no matter what people say about, it will always be there. Whether literacy takes the form of social media, news, writing a paper, or other things, it will remain a major part of life. This is why we cannot forget it. And I, from experience, can say that books don’t give me the chance to forget literacy.

“Let’s go bud, time for bed,” my mom called to me.
I put down my pencil and ran up the stairs to get ready for bed. I always loved reading; it would make my imagination run wild. I didn’t know how yet to read, but with everyday I got a little bit closer to understanding.

“Alright son, tonight, we’re going to finish The Horse and His Boy.”

“Nice,” I replied. “Finally the ending!”

As soon as I was born, my parents were reading to me, or so I was told. My parents to me so often, that they still today tell me about all the books I read during my childhood. Granted, they have given a significant portion of those away, but there still exists a small collection of children’s books in the house. My parents say those are their favorites. has left me with a true love for reading and literature.I have learned to love all different kinds of books, whether that was a biography about some famous person, or a nonfiction novel about a kid’s experience growing up with no parents, or even a science fiction novel about life on another planet. I’ve learned to truly appreciate books

As I got older, and learned how to read, I would do it  constantly. I would read anything I could get my hands on, whether it was a nonfiction book, magazine, or even an essay online about something I was interested in. I think it is acceptable to say that there was never a time in my early childhood when I wasn’t currently reading something. Nowadays, this is no longer true, but I distinctly remember reading all the time, even if that meant re-reading a series once or even twice because I loved it so much. Sherman Alexie described my situation perfectly in her essay titled, The Joy of Reading and Writing, “I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open.” She, like myself, remember reading whenever she could, even when she wasn’t supposed to be.

Jimmy Santiago Baca put how I felt about books into words in the film A Place to Stand. “I didn’t want to the guy to hit my eyes so I could read the story.” I was so deeply in love with reading that if something happened to me that rendered me unable to read, part of me would die. Reading was such a big part of my childhood, that if I didn’t have books, I don’t think I would be same person I am today. I would not have the same imagination, the same creativity that I have today. And those things are such a part of me that I would indeed be a different person.

Looking back on these things, I can easily see how books and literacy helped me grow. Reading helped me to understand and appreciate forms of writing from a very early age.. I’ve learned to value books and whatever wisdom they held within their two covers. I learned to see the meaning or reason why a certain part of a book was written. I can very easily read what is happening “between the lines,” as some people say. Reading gave me this ability, which I cherish with all my heart.

Now that I am closing on my seventeenth birthday, I still read every now and then, but I’m no longer that little kid that was obsessed with books. Other things occupy my time, and some days I don’t even touch a book. I still retain my love for books and literacy though. If I find a book I haven’t read I’ll be busy until I read the last word. I also can still look at things in life and appreciate the literacy held within it. I doubt anything could happen that would take away my love for books and literacy.