The First Day Analysis

In “The Cellar” by Natasha Preston is about a 16 year old girl named Summer Robinson. She lives a fairly good life, and nothing extraordinary has ever happened.The setting takes place in present time in a small town called Long Thorpe but mostly in a cellar. A community where nothing bad really takes place, until young Summer is alone is taken. She is brought to a different aspect of a new yet drastic life of thriller. A life that 's not easy to overcome if it ever is possible to overcome. With only one easy way out and the cost is her life.

From new and upcoming author, Edward P. Jones, comes his first short story The First Day.

“The First Day” by Edward P. Jones is a short story written in 1992. The short story is about an African American mother taking her young daughter to school for the first time. The daughter becomes ashamed of her mother because she sees where her education level is at. The mother is also ashamed of herself because she didn’t get education throughout her life. In “The First Day” the opening scene sets the tone for challenging the status quo and creating a life of success.

In her narrative essay “The Sanctuary of School,” Lynda Barry recounts a story from her childhood that illustrates her relationships at school vs her relationships at home. She tells us how public school was her sanctuary from her unstable home life. It was a stable environment that she depended on. She tells us this when she says ,"[F]or the next six hours I was going to enjoy a thoroughly secure, warm and stable world." Unlike at home, her school was a place she was noticed and cared about.

In “The Sanctuary of School” Lynda applies her personal life to the fact that some people think cutting down budgets for public schools will benefit when times get tough. Also that art, music and the creative ideas will be the first to go when budgets are cut. Lynda had a rough childhood where her parents had money issues and family members that needed temporarily to stay at her home (Barry, 721). The lack of attention from her parents made her look for attention elsewhere in this case the school. Lynda saw her teacher Mrs. LeSane as a mother figure. Mrs. LeSane instead of questioning troubled children got the children to release their troubled selves through creativity. Lynda states that when she decided to sneak out of her home she went to

In Florence Kelley’s heart wrenching call for awareness of child labor she uses quite a few rhetorical devices. An anaphora is the most recognizable as she’s trying to nail in how she would could be helping the children. Pathos is another of her persuasion methods used in her tone. Kelley also uses a fair amount of imagery throughout the passage.

Sometimes you have to look at both perspectives of an argument to completely understand them. The author of Tortilla Sun is Jennifer Cervantes and Diana López wrote Confetti Girl. These two novels are realistic fiction. Confetti Girl revolves around a girl who only has a father who is a teacher and lends her daughter his copy of a book. The girl says that she will read the book but instead puts a soda can on it. Tortilla Sun is about a girl called Izzy and her mother who is a college student. To graduate, Izzy’s mother makes Izzy move to New Mexico for two months with her grandma while she does an experiment. Izzy does not have a choice as her mother already bought plane tickets. The protagonist’s viewpoints differ with those of their parents causing conflict.

Caitlin Flanagan 's piece “Cultivating Failure” appeared in the Atlantic 's January/ February 2010 issue. The Edible schoolyard program teaches students to grow food. Instead, Flanagan is trying to persuade the reader that having school gardens will help students in school.It also talks about “ A Garden In Every School’(420) She added this quote, because she thinks adding a garden to every school could improve graduation rates. She continues to explain both sides of adding a garden to school properties.

In preparation for this paper I chose to read Fire in the ashes: twenty five years among the poorest children in America by Jonathan Kozol. In this book Kozol has followed these children and their family’s lives for the past twenty five years. In his writing Kozol portrays a point of view most from his background and standing would not be capable of having. He portrays what life is like for those who have been let down by the system that was meant to protect them. Kozols writing style can be very blunt at times, not for shock value, but for the sake of portraying these children’s realities, and not sugarcoating the inequalities that they are faced with. There was a lot of balance within this book. In the book there are two parts: part one

William Faulkner was an American author and Nobel prize winner of 1950; in his acceptance speech, he presented the idea that it is a writer’s duty to write about the compassion, courage, and pride of the heart. Faulkner says, “It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” In the memoir, Kabul Beauty School, a young American woman named Deborah wrote her truth about how she traveled to Afghanistan to support the women of Kabul, but she takes an unexpected turn and her heart leads her to help them in a totally different way. Deborah shows compassion, courage, pity and sacrifice through the women in Kabul. Deborah fulfills her duty through her compelling words and delineate observations of the people she is newly experiencing.

Ms. Pedone and I quickly reviewed her monthly calendar to see if she had added anything new to it . She did not add anything to the calendar.

Both Toni Morrison’s “Sweetness” and Edward P. Jones’ “The First Day” are short stories written by African American individuals. Other than this very basic similarity, these stories and their authors bear resemblance to each other. Both of the authors lived in a time before the internet, cell phones and probably more importantly the rise of an equal rights for all races movement. Given these facts and their shared African heritage, it is understandable both of the stories have at least an undertone of racial issues. On the more superficial level both “Sweetness” and “The First Day” feature a mother-daughter relationship. Even if this relationship is present in both stories, the qualities of this mother-daughter relationship and the tone of

Jessi Mann stood in front of her floor-to-ceiling mirror, brushing her long brown hair while she listened to the pop music emitting from her stereo.

Hollywood has made many movies that involve teenagers and their lives in high school. In most of those movies, they portray high school differently than actual high school. One of those movies is Mean Girls. The movie is about a girl named Cady Heron who moves to a new city from Africa and attends a public school for the first time. She gets in trouble a lot at first because she does not know the rules and customs of an American school. She quickly becomes friends with social outcasts Janis and Damian who warn her to avoid the school’s most popular girls. The popular girls take in interest in her, so Janis asks her to pretend to be friends with the popular girls, so they could mess with them. She

As Americans, we view the Constitution as a stepping stone to making the great country we live in today. Yet, we the people of the United States failed to realize another component in order to form a perfect union. Which is to establish and promote equal opportunities for a quality education for all. However, we live in a society where social locators such as class, gender, and race are huge factors in the determination of one’s educational future. Our social location determines our access to power, privilege, or our lack of power and privilege. It gives us status and blocks us from having status. Statistically, there is thirty-seven percent of Americans who go to College while sixty-four percent do not. I am an African American eighteen-year-old