Cedric Jennings in A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
Throughout the novel, A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, Cedric Jennings is a minority student in a poor, inner city school, trying to fight his way up to the top. He has a greater hope for himself than the overwhelming majority of the other students at Ballou High. Cedric faces many challenges to eventually make his way to Brown University. According to Labaree, Cedric is exercising the goal of social mobility, meaning that he works against the competition to get into a high-ranking college and hopefully a well-paying job. Although personally Cedric is trying to obtain this goal, I am having difficulty placing what purpose of education that Ballou High is trying to fulfill.
Cedric is an unusual student to walk the halls of Ballou High. Unlike most of his peers, he actually wants to make something of himself; he does his homework, he studies and he works on extra credit projects. The majority of the kids at Ballou barely come to class, much less make any attempt at learning. Since this is the overall attitude of the school, Cedric must exercise social mobility and do whatever he can to better himself as an individual. He is not necessarily competing against the students at Ballou (because he by far surpasses them), but he is in competition with all the other students from better schools throughout the area. During the summer that Cedric spends at MIT, he is truly awakened to the fact that he was extremely far behind the other students from urban areas. The director of the program expresses his frustration with the MIT program- "When he first arrived... He had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America-... He saw that he had been drea...
... middle of paper ...
...uality. In fact there is a severe inequality in only preparing the top few students for society. Therefore, it is hard to decide what goal of Labaree's that Ballou High embodies. The bottom line is that some students value social mobility and the rest of the school values nothing.
In conclusion, although Cedric is able to exercise social mobility, his school does not prepare him for the outside world at all. It is only through his own resolve that he is able to make it in the competitive, academic world. The only good that Ballou probably brought to Cedric was the notion to work even harder so that he did not end up like his fellow peers, with no goals, going nowhere, and valuing nothing. It is this value of nothing that severely hinders our nation's public school systems.
Works Cited
Suskind, Ron. A Hope in the Unseen. Broadway Books, New York. 1998.
Baldwin talks about role and how one must change their place in the world in order to appreciate one’s role in society, while Freire talked about how the teachers in the schooling systems needed to change their roles in the lives of those they taught. Baldwin talks about his place in the world and how isolated he felt from the people of America. He had to leave America to find his “role— as distinguished…from [his] “place” — in the extraordinary drama which is America, [he] was released from the illusion that [he] hated America” (Baldwin 2). Going to France released him from the role he thought he was stuck in. Freire adds to this idea when talking about the role of students and teachers who “instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “‘banking ' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (Freire 1). Freire discuses the solution to this problem by using “problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical characteristic of banking education [and] can fulfill its function of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Freire 6). According to Freire one of the main problems with the ‘banking’ is “the banking approach to adult education…will never propose to students that they critically consider reality” (Freire 3). Baldwin also talks about his role when he says that while in France he started listening to Bessie Smith to “ re-create the life that [he] had first known as a child and from which [he] had spent so many years in flight” (Baldwin 1). For years Baldwin had avoided certain activities and foods
...h School ten years later, Shamus Rahman Khan discovers that the school that claims to have become more diverse still has a lot of inequality in it. The way to succeed in this school is to master the art of being at ease with different things, from students’ own behavior to forming relationships across different classes and cultures. If this does not happen, then the students are not privileged and will not succeed or go off to a good college. The illusion of equality is ripped into snippets because of Khan’s different reasoning behind why only the elite are succeeding.
Tracking is where students are identified as gifted or placed in remedial classes. By doing this, students learn about their overall success and achievements in comparison to the other groups. In the documentary, the principal, Rob Gasparello, addresses why their school is not the greatest. He states that their school has a “terrible reputation” and that the numbers do not lie. Looking at the data would assume that the overall success rate is not as high as other schools. By knowing this, it can be detrimental to the students’ education. This can be detrimental because students who attend this high school may start believing that they will never be successful so why bother trying. Other students who do not attend this high school may not have respect for these schools and assume they are better because they believe that they go to a better school. This is an example of inequality in education and studies have shown that while education benefits everyone, it does not benefit everyone equally. An inequality in education mirrors and inequality in
The historical event of Hurricane Katrina, a category three hurricane with winds ranging from 111-130 mph, in August 2005 revealed major structural failures in the levee systems of New Orleans. Though not all structural failures are as catastrophic, the breeched levees led to loss of life, homes, businesses, highways, and left a trail of destruction that is still being repaired today. The result of this failure led to lawsuits, conspiracy theories, and court cases. Hurricane Katrina had a major effect upon our country and those results are still rippling on today. Though a city once devastated, major improvements to the failed system have been made and leave the city feeling safe once again.
Marcus’s family is poor. His mother is a single parent. She is working long hours as a seamstress to provide for Marcus and her daughter, Sabrina, after her husband left the family. They live in a public housing estate referred to as the projects. Eddie has two parents that are both in jobs. They have a better economy than Marcus’s family, but Eddie doesn’t get as much money as he’d like to. They live in a private house in the same area of Queens as Marcus lives in. It is the beginning of the final term in high school, and parties and trips are coming up. The boys have saved up money to cover the expenses for a long time. But then, Nike comes out with a brand new pair of shoes in the basketball team’s colors, maroon and powder blue. Everyone on the team is getting a pair, and everyone will notice if the stars of the team haven’t got them as well. The boys consider themselves as too good for jobs, so th...
“Birth Control at School? Most Say It's OK.” Cbsnews.com 1 Nov 2007. Online. 13 Dec 2009
“I always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” she stated. Her passion for helping children with special needs was developed at a later age. The reason why Chris decided to be a special education teacher was because of two twin boys in her grade who had special needs. Chris was only in kindergarten at the time, but she recalls that one of these boys did not get to go to school. The other boy, Jimmy, could come to school, but he would have to leave halfway through the school day. Chris was confused and upset about how Jimmy could not be at school and asked her mom about this. The reason why Jimmy and his brother were not at school was because there was no special education program. This moment, even though she was in kindergarten, shaped Chris’s plan for her
Make no mistake that slave owners came up with the word Nigger and it was only supposed to mean an individual, who is lazy, unwise, and good for nothing, but somewhere along the history lines of slavery the N word began to be used more as racial insult against the non-white Americans of that era. It would also be irrational for one to assume or to contemplate that slaves did not poke fun at their masters after a hard working day at the cotton plantations. That is why for that reason it should come to no surprise that the black African Americans invented comedy back during the slavery era. It is believed that “slaves were treated with favour for putting smiles on their master’s face by the way they performed and slave masters would take turns to send their slave performers off to a neighbouring plantation to amuse another family, as well as showing off the talented darkie the senders posed”(Littleton, 2006.p.7).
While talking with his teacher, Mr. P, Arnold is told that he needs to go wherever there is hope. “You have to take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope.” (Alexie 43) However, Mr. P wasn’t the only one helping Arnold. After switching from Wellpinit to Reardan, Arnold picks up some unlikely friends: Roger and Penelope. Each of them teach him something, and even keep his secret of being poor after he admits he can’t pay for going out to eat after a school dance he couldn’t even afford. “He’s not going to tell anybody. Roger likes you.” (Alexie 127) Arnold recognizes the value of these people helping him through the struggles of being the poor kid in a school dominated by students from well off families. Although he may continue to be held down by poverty, Arnold discovers that being vulnerable to friends can sometimes lead to unexpected support and people you can rely on. Arnold’s perseverance shines when he decides to attend Reardan despite its risks, and the loss of his best friend Rowdy as a result. Not letting exhaustion and the blisters on his feet take away his determination, Arnold still attends school every
The government response was lackluster at best. The scenarios the government war gamed in order to prepare for mass destruction and disaster was not adequate enough to contain the unanticipated damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and failing levees. Once breached, the rescue and response to the...
In the book A Hope in the Unseen is about a young African American young boy named Cedric Jennings, who experience many things throughout his life that not only he learns about what he didn’t know he can know, but changed him completely on his journey of high school and college years. Growing up in Washington, D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where drop rates were higher than kids that actually attended school. Cedric is a well intelligent and motivated student who keeps mostly to himself. He has one goal only and that is to attend Ivy League University and keep himself away from the drugs and violence that surrounds him on a daily basis. With the help from his mother Barbara Jennings, a few teachers and experience at a rigorous pre-college program at MIT Cedric is accepted to Brown University. Cedric is someone who people can relate to in real life situation and this story is one of the ways of sharing this story of his that people can learn things they never knew they can learn from.
Jeanette shows her experience as a marginalized group who is trying to fit in the subcultural group at school. When she says,“Some of the kids looked as poor as me, with home-cut hair and holes in the toes of their shoes. I found it a lot easier to fit in than at Welch Elementary”(199). The word “fit in” closely represents that she is considering herself at a fringe. This is described when she enters a school that is full of students. Some of those students are also not even privileged and they have made a subcultural people of group that is considered as poor. She tries to settle in it easily because she is going through the same existing environment that is marginalized.
Hurricanes are powerful and destructive storms that involve great rain and wind. The United States of America has dealt with many hurricanes that have cost a great amount of damage. However, there is one hurricane that happened in 2005 that stands out among the others, Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States, a category 5 on the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale. An estimated 1836 people died because of the hurricane and the floodings that happened after (Zimmermann 1). Katrina initially beg...
Stephanie, Dryer. "Reasons Women Need Access to Birth Control." Policy Me. Mic Network Inc, 11 June
Richardson, J. (1995, May 14) Talking about Sex Education: New Generation of Parents Still Tongue Tied About Sex. Maine Telegraph (Portland, ME) 1C+ Sirs Researcher