The Power of Reading Reading a book is a great entertainment, but more importantly, it gives you more knowledge to learn. In a short story entitled “Superman and me” by Sherman Alexie, he discussed how it’s like to be in a minority, or an Indian in a non-Indian world, and how reading helped him get through it. Growing up, his father influenced him into reading books. Due to this he started to teach himself how to read and gained more knowledge. Though he is smart, it was hard for him to be noticed, “Indian children were expected to be stupid,” because of this he worked hard and proved the majority what he is capable of. Alexie’s passion in reading had helped himself and his fellow man rise against all the discrimination and be accepted by …show more content…
the majority. Growing up, my sister was one of the people who influenced me on reading books. I was four years old when she started to read books and shared stories on what she had read. Seeing her enjoying what she was reading made me eager on learning how to read, kind of like how Alexie saw his father likes reading and it makes him want to read. I remember the first time I held a book, Snow White and the Seven Dwarf, it was so colorful I end up turning page by page. Not being able to read it frustrated me, but it also pushed me to learn how to read. I was almost five when I started learning how to read. It was a long process but it was all worth it. I already knew the story of Snow White that time but I kept on reading my favorite part when Snow White cleaned the house by the help of the animals because I just love have I can now understand the colorful picture. Also, I remember how I avoided apples because of Snow White and how I embraced the beauty of nature. I even asked my older sister if animals can really clean clean houses and suggested my mom that we should get a pet so someone can help us clean our room. I guess for me, as a kid, reading become very influential and it opened my imaginations by thinking possible in some things that are impossibles. Another example of my literacy sponsors are my English teachers.
As time goes by, I noticed how reading and writing became one of my weaknesses. Having an assignment readings and writing an essay about it was one of the things I don’t like doing. I am not sure if there are any valid reason on why I don’t like it but all I know is there is always a point where I end up getting stuck because I do not know what else to say. Also, reading gets deeper and some of the words are hard to understand especially when some of the readings use metaphors. However, in every essay I turned in, I always look forward on all of my teacher’s comments because I always want to know what else I am missing, what else to say, and how to improve it. I guess in this case, Sherman Alexie and I are opposite towards our view on writing but we are the alike on the view of learning and improving. Lastly, being away from home has became my number one reason now why I read. Living here in United States for almost four years is like a roller coaster. There are times where I am up high and happy and there times that I feel down and alone. It takes time to cope up and feel that I really belong, that this is home now. Reading a book had helped me escape from reality. It became a pastime and entertainment for me. Whenever I read a book, I feel like I am in a different world where I can relate myself, I feel like I am a kid again, imagining scenarios that are happening in the book and I am in it
too. My relationship with reading is not always positive, there are times where I get bored and end up not finishing what I have started. But I know that whatever I do, even if it takes months since I stopped reading a book for pastime, I will always go back and start reading again. Like how Snow White got lost and find the dwarfs who accepted her as a family.
As I grew up learning to read was something I learned in school, yet for Sherman Alexie and Malcolm X can’t say the same. These two amazing authors taught themselves, at different stages of their lives, to read. In Sherman Alexie’s essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” and Malcolm X’s essay “Learning to Read” they both explain the trials and experiences they went through that encouraged them to work to achieve literacy.
My parents have always stressed the importance of reading. Throughout my whole life, they have motivated me to read and they have encouraged me to find books that I find interesting to read. Because of their encouragement, I am an avid reader today. When I was a child, just starting to enjoy reading I liked to read books that were fiction. Some of my favorite books to read as a child are series that I still love today and I think I still have every book in each series stored in my attic. They are The Boxcar Children, Junie B. Jones, and The Magic Tree House.
In Sherman Alexie's “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” the focus is on his struggle growing up poor on the reservation. Many people would have assumed that he was a child prodigy because he taught himself to read at an early age through his hero Superman’s comic book. Reading was the escape from his life of fences on the reservation. Despite the expectations for the children by their tribal elders, he demonstrated his love of the learning process and used the opportunities of the schools to free himself from the reservation; this made him a dangerous Indian. He dealt with the bullies of the school who made sure every Indian child followed the creed o...
In Malcolm X's "Learning to Read," he tells the story of how he taught himself to read from the inside of a prison and how that nurtured his future career as a political activist. In Sherman Alexie's "The joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me," he talks about how Indians are expected to fail in non-Indian society and he claims that
In the second last paragraph of this essay, Alexie uses the parallel structure of “I read…” to emphasize his passion in reading and his strong determination to pursue his purpose of saving his life as an Indian who is always challenged by stereotypes. The last paragraph repeats “write poetry, short stories, or novels” for four times in different scenarios, including Alexie himself has never been taught of how to “write poetry, short stories, or novels”, and he is now teaching the Indian kids “writing poetry, short stories, or novels”. Alexie employs this repetition to highlight the fact that reading and writing still play essential roles in the Indian life, and there are always Indian people who are interested in learning about reading and write just like him. The final sentences in the last two paragraphs are only slightly different. Alexie ends the second last paragraph of this essay with his ultimate goal after stating his experience as a passionate reader in the beginning.
Alexie shows a strong difference between the treatment of Indian people versus the treatment of white people, and of Indian behavior in the non-Indian world versus in their own. A white kid reading classic English literature at the age of five was undeniably a "prodigy," whereas a change in skin tone would instead make that same kid an "oddity." Non-white excellence was taught to be viewed as volatile, as something incorrect. The use of this juxtaposition exemplifies and reveals the bias and racism faced by Alexie and Indian people everywhere by creating a stark and cruel contrast between perceptions of race. Indian kids were expected to stick to the background and only speak when spoken to. Those with some of the brightest, most curious minds answered in a single word at school but multiple paragraphs behind the comfort of closed doors, trained to save their energy and ideas for the privacy of home. The feistiest of the lot saw their sparks dulled when faced with a white adversary and those with the greatest potential were told that they had none. Their potential was confined to that six letter word, "Indian." This word had somehow become synonymous with failure, something which they had been taught was the only form of achievement they could ever reach. Acceptable and pitiable rejection from the
American Indian students make up less than one percent of college or higher education students, and less than one third of American Indian students are continuing education after high school. In his memoir essay The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me, Sherman Alexie recalls learning to read, growing up on a reservation where he was expected to fail, and working tirelessly to read more and become a writer. Sherman Alexie had to overcome stereotypes in order to be accepted as smart and become a writer, which shows that it is harder for people who are stereotyped to be successful because they have less opportunities.
In a world dominated by technology, reading novels has become dull. Instead of immersing into books, we choose to listen to Justin Bieber’s new songs and to scroll through Instagram posts. We have come to completely neglect the simple pleasures of flipping through pages and getting to finally finish a story. Sherman Alexie and Stephan King’s essays attempt to revive this interest in books that has long been lost. They remind us of the important role that reading plays in our daily lives. “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” for instance, demonstrates how being literate saved the narrator from the oppressive nature of society. The author explains that even though he was capable of reading complex books at an astonishingly young
In the story of Sherman Alexie, his hobby of reading books empowered his future. Just like Sherman Alexie did, anyone can have their life changed from a hobby. A hobby of my own could possibly take me places that I never could imagine. In “ Superman and Me ” Sherman Alexie said, “ I write novels, short stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids.” Sherman Alexie uses his profession to teach kids about what he does for a living. He also creates books for kids and adults. Another quote Sherman Alexie wrote is “ The books he (Sherman Alexie) read saved his life so he didn’t become dumb like the other kids.” Books helped him along to where he is today. They are what separated him from the “dumb” people.
“What I can remember is this: I was three years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian reservation in eastern Washington State.” (Alexie, 2017). This is a direct quote taken from the Core Reading I chose, “Superman and Me”. This article is written by a well known au-thor, Sherman Alexie. Alexie chose to write a informative essay. However, his audience varies from the kids he speaks to and the readers of his novels, short stories, as well as his poems that he writes. There could be many different purposes and reasoning for Alexie to write this article but the main one found was to share how he learned to read as well as inform the readers of his upbringing. The tone is many things
At the beginning of this essay Alexie gives some background information on his story which informs the reader that he may not have had the education that he would have liked, but he got by by reading. He says that he loves his father and he wanted to be able to read like his father. So, that’s what he did. By reading it gave him the confidence to not act like all the other young Indian boys on the reserve. He wasn’t afraid to let people know that he was smart. He cared about reading and wasn’t going to give that up. By having this strong confidence in his reading it inspired people in generations today to succeed in school even if they are in an Indian reserve and may not have the most stable
Growing up in working class family, my mom worked all the time for the living of a big family with five kids, and my dad was in re-education camp because of his association with U.S. government before 1975. My grandma was my primary guardian. “Go to study, go to read your books, read anything you like to read if you want to have a better life,” my grandma kept bouncing that phrase in my childhood. It becomes the sole rule for me to have better future. I become curious and wonder what the inside of reading and write can make my life difference. In my old days, there was no computer, no laptop, no phone…etc, to play or to spend time with, other than books. I had no other choice than read, and read and tended to dig deep in science books, math books, and chemistry books. I tended to interest in how the problem was solved. I even used my saving money to buy my own math books to read more problems and how to solve the problem. I remembered that I ended up reading the same math book as my seventh grade teacher. She used to throw the challenge questions on every quiz to pick out the brighter student. There was few students know how to solve those challenge questions. I was the one who fortunately nailed it every single time. My passion and my logic for reading and writing came to me through that experience, and also through my grandma and my mom who plant the seed in me, who want their kids to have happy and better life than they were. In my own dictionary, literacy is not just the ability to read and write, it is a strong foundation to build up the knowledge to have better life, to become who I am today.
The story “Superman and me” by Alexie Sherman discussed his life as an Indian boy. The author writes about how he first learned how to read. His childhood was on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His family was poor. But his father spend all extra money to buy books. There were a lot of books in their house. Sherman states, “My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well"(245). In other words, he believes he loved books because his father loved books. Alexie described his first steps how he learned to read with a Superman comic book. He looked at the pictures of comic books and pretended to read. He learned about paragraphs and began to relate his surroundings to paragraphs. He taught himself how to read at small age. After that he started to read a lot of papers everywhere. Also this paper explained the struggles Indian people have trying to survive in a non-Indian environment. Finally, Sherman Alexie became a writer and started to teach Indian students. He wanted to give them the opportunities that he never had. This story illustrates how Indian boy from poor family taught himself how to read and became a successful writer.
Reading has been one of my favorite hobbies since I was a little child. I grew up as a normal child should grow and eventually I had to start learning for me to fit in society. My literacy started many years ago, after I knew how to talk and communicate with people. Reading my alphabet was quite stressful and I had to be given a hand by my family members. I remember my parents reading with me and it was the most meaningful and memorable way to spend time with me. This is because I liked reading a lot and I was eager to learn so that I could fit in with my older siblings. My favorite books were storybooks taking about adventures and fairytales
Instead of having the same knowledge as every kid his age, Alexie reads Grapes of Wrath in kindergarten when other children are struggling through Dick and Jane” (496). Alexie dedicates himself to learning how to understand sentences and read at a really high level. Instead of being like other Indian children, Alexie teaches himself information that will lead him to be the best he can be. He was dedicated to learning and said, “I read books late into the night, and I can barely keep my eyes open” (496). The dedication he had was amazing because not many children at his age stayed up all night long just to read. Many children now stay up texting or watching their favorite TV shows. Alexie shows another point of view. By the information given in the essay, he is a boy who is dedicated to learning and increasing his