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Urban or rural education
The differences between rural and urban education
The first day of secondary school
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My mother took me to school on my first day. Mother had been telling me for weeks prior to the big day how wonderful school was going to be, so I was dutifully excited. She failed to mention that she was going to leave me with seventeen little strangers and one large lady. The large lady seemed to think that she was in control. I later learned that she was the teacher. She was trying to explain to Mother that I was not eligible to attend first grade because I would not be six until November of the following year. My mother was having none of that. She wanted me out of the house and into school and she did not care what the rules were.
We had just moved from New Orleans to the woods of St. Helena Parish, where school had started two weeks before we arrived. Although it was 1945 in the rest of the world, it was still 1920 in St. Helena. Our home in New Orleans had had indoor plumbing, a gas stove, and electric heaters. In the country, however, we had an outhouse. Every drop of water we used was pumped and carried inside. We chopped wood for our stove and heaters. The back breaking, never ending labor did not bother me as much as having to live in such a degrading manner. I hated the woods. I missed the comforts of the city and I hated the primitive conditions of our new country life. I missed my good-natured little playmates who had treated me so kindly for the first five years of my life. I missed the gentle accents spoken in soft voices by my friends and neighbors, and the endless hours of playtime that we enjoyed.
But now I was going to have to go to school! For a while, I thought the rule that a child had to be six before entering the first grade would rescue me. School rules back then, li...
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At lunchtime, I offered to share my cookies with a very angry girl. She had been staring at them ever since I had taken them out of their wax paper wrapping. They were only vanilla wafers, and certainly were not my favorite. She told me that she had never tasted store bought cookies, and pronounced them fit for a king. She became my lifetime friend and protector. She remained an angry person, but seldom got angry with me. The big boy dumped me in the fifth grade for a girl who had matured very early.
The first day of school, I learned these valuable lessons. Accents only sound strange to people who have different accents. Never bother arguing with my mother. Crying does not help, but sometime you just have to do it anyway. A little sweetness can make an angry person nicer. Flattery goes a long way with a guy; sometimes it can even go as far as the fifth grade.
Public housing complexes were seen as pleasurable places. When the boys’ mother, LaJoe, first moved to Horner she was thirteen. The homes had white, freshly painted walls, new linoleum floors, closets you could hide in, and brand new appliances. The children went to dances in the basement, belonged to the girl scouts, and played outside on the playground surrounded by freshly planted grass. This harmonious sight all came to an abrupt end. The housing authority did not have the money or interest to put into the projects. They did not have much concern for low-income families and, therefore, the projects were neglected. The smell in the apartments became so bad that people thought dead fetuses were being flushed down the toilets. The appliances in the apartments hardly ever worked, so cooking was limited. After an inspection of the basement, over 2000 new and used appliances were found covered with rats, animal carcasses and excrements. The dead animals, paraphernalia, and female undergarments explained the smell lingering throughout the apartments.
“In twentieth-century America the history of poverty begins with most working people living on the edge of destitution, periodically short of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter” (Poverty in 20th Century America). Poverty possesses the ability to completely degrade a person, as well as a family, but it can also make that person and family stronger. In The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, a family of immigrants has to live in severe poverty in Packingtown, a suburb of Chicago. The poverty degrades the family numerous times, and even brings them close to death. Originally the family has each other to fall back on, but eventually members of the family must face numerous struggles on their own, including “hoboing it” and becoming a prostitute. The Jungle, a naturalistic novel by Upton Sinclair, reveals the detrimental effects that a life of poverty exerts on the familial relationships of immigrants in Chicago during the early 1900’s.
John Grisham’s book, ‘A Painted House’ places the reader within the walls of a simple home on the cotton fields of rural Arkansas. Within the first few pages, the author’s description of the setting quickly paints a picture of a hard working family and creates a shared concern with the reader about the family’s struggle to meet the basic needs of life. The description of the dusty roads, the unpainted board-sided house, the daily chore requirements and their lack of excess cause the reader a reaction of empathy for the family. Although the story takes place in a dusty setting very unfamiliar to most readers, the storyline is timeless and universal. Most everyone has a desire to meet the basic needs of life, embrace their family ties, and make others and ourselves proud. The crux of this book is that it does an excellent job in showing the reader through other’s examples and hardships to persevere and never give up.
As one of the most prosperous nations, the Unites States desired to protect and manage “their” portion of the world. In the early 1800s, James Monroe created a plan that adhered to the isolationists’ point of view in America. This plan became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Time passed quickly and as the United States acquired more land, Theodore Roosevelt revolutionized the plan with the Roosevelt Corollary. Roosevelt’s ideas altered the way foreign affairs in the Western Hemisphere were handled.
When Willy and Linda purchased their home in Brooklyn, it seemed far removed from the city. Willy was young and strong and he believed he had a future full of success. He and his sons cut the tree limbs that threatened his home and put up a hammock that he would enjoy with his children. The green fields filled his home with wonderful aromas. Over the years, while Willy was struggling to pay for his home, the city grew and eventually surrounded the house.
White privilege is something that has been here since the creation of the United States. This is something that is not reflected in the media today; being that institutional racism is subconsciously embedded in all humans the lack of awareness within white privilege surpasses the common mindset of viewers when it comes to racial humor in films. Society has been taught that this kind of behavior is fine to express because of the more liberal world in which we live in. In Thornton analyzation of Psych he comes to a point in which films are constructed by a particular audience for a particular audience. “Psych’s exploration of race-related comedy generally works in the service of whiteness, and any critical potential is largely contained by the show’s assimilationist patterns of representation and its development of a character-driven interracial friendship story”( ”(Thornton 2011 p429). Being that films are made and produced by white film makers this reinforces the institutional racism that most Americans hold about one another. The stereotypic depictions are not from a source that would relate to that particular ethnic group that is being criticized in films. But in fact they are created in the mindset of individuals based on how they see the race or your previous media technique to display a particular form of humor to the audience that the films are
The story begins as the boy describes his neighborhood. Immediately feelings of isolation and hopelessness begin to set in. The street that the boy lives on is a dead end, right from the beginning he is trapped. In addition, he feels ignored by the houses on his street. Their brown imperturbable faces make him feel excluded from the decent lives within them. The street becomes a representation of the boy’s self, uninhabited and detached, with the houses personified, and arguably more alive than the residents (Gray). Every detail of his neighborhood seems designed to inflict him with the feeling of isolation. The boy's house, like the street he lives on, is filled with decay. It is suffocating and “musty from being long enclosed.” It is difficult for him to establish any sort of connection to it. Even the history of the house feels unkind. The house's previous tenant, a priest, had died while living there. He “left all his money to institutions and the furniture of the house to his sister (Norton Anthology 2236).” It was as if he was trying to insure the boy's boredom and solitude. The only thing of interest that the boy can find is a bicycle pump, which is rusty and rendered unfit to play with. Even the “wild” garden is gloomy and desolate, containing but a lone apple tree and a few straggling bushes. It is hardly the sort of yard that a young boy would want. Like most boys, he has no voice in choosing where he lives, yet his surroundings have a powerful effect on him.
There are about twenty lots in our neighborhood; all consist of close to three and a half acres. Most of the lots have houses now, all of them are big and well kept; a perfect place to raise an upper-middle class family. Just outside of Richmond, the Boscobel neighborhood gives individuals a constant taste of the southern country air, a place to grow a garden, to sit out on the porch at night and look at the stars.… The neighbors are kind as they greet one another in passing. Families come together for picnics and cook-outs and mothers go on walks together with their dogs while the kids are in school. The kids of the neighborhood love to play by the creek in the back yard. They build forts and huts, find pretend food and crayfish in the creek, and play hide-and-seek in the woods beyond the creek. It is the peaceful, everyday life in the Boscobel neighborhood.
Thayer, James. "Mandatory Recycling Wastes Resources." Garbage and Recycling. Ed. Margaret Haerens. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from "Recycle This!" Weekly Standard (25 Jan. 2006). Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 2 July 2014.
Since my cultural experience was on the Japanese culture, I decided I would continue on with that interest and write my paper about the Japanese culture therefor giving me a chance to do more research about the culture. The Japanese culture is really rich and diverse, there is a particular hierarchy or structure to the Japanese culture, Denison (2002) stated that “Japanese culture is structured around black and white norms for acceptable group behavior. People who do not function by there norms are viewed as outsiders who lack legitimate status. Black and white expectations of behavior produce equally clear cut conformity, resulting in high harmony and certainly of outcome, trust is early through continuous conformity”.This is a huge and really important aspect of their culture because it governs their social standing, interacting with others and the way they are seen, and when it comes to your social standing in the culture, the way you are seen and respected by those around you is very important.
O'Connell, E. (2011, January/February). Increasing Public Participation in Municipal Solid Waste Reduction. Geographical Bulletin, 52(2), 105-118. Retrieved from http://www.gammathetaupsilon.org/geographical-bulletin.html
Since my first year in kindergarten, I was kind of homesick, so I ran to my sister’s classroom and stuck with her all the time. Because of my stubbornness, my teacher gave up forcing me back ...
Far too many people opt out of recycling; therefore initiatives should not be solely voluntary. Landfills are becoming more full, and air pollution has reached such high levels that there needs to be government mandates to address these serious and on-going issues. Cities such as San Francisco, Pittsburg, San Diego, Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Connecticut, Florida and Honolulu have enacted mandatory recycling laws mainly due to difficulties in land fillings and dispos...
Recycling has many benefits not only does it help the environment by reducing the amount of landfills witch cost tax payer dollars in addition to ruining the environment around them. It can help reduce the cost of making a new product such a plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and paper. In addition to this some recycling companies will pay citizens a small amount f...
For most of America, recycling has become a way of life. For some, it is a valiant effort to take charge of our waste and do what is right for the environment and for future generations. For others, it is a forced mentality by government agencies or private businesses who attempt to prove their value by self-promoting their commitment to environmental responsibility. Recycling, in theory, is a positive effort; however, massive recycling programs are not the answer. Recycling programs in general lack an intelligent way to a means, since the costs and environmental burden may outweigh the desired result. Recyclers should only focus on materials that they can process in a cost effective way, and consumers should focus