It has become an unspoken rule that every weekend, the whole family eats dinner outside. On Sunday morning, my grandpa calls the house phone to tell us we’re going to have dinner with my aunt and her family along with a reminder to pick them up at their house 5 o’clock sharp. What happens at dinner is exactly how you imagine family dinners to be, with the adults catching up and talking about the news. Once the bill is paid and the leftovers are wrapped, grandpa’s eyes slowly meet those of us in our youth as if to relay us a message. My youngest cousin immediately goes to him and whispers, “Grandpa, pupunta na ba tayo sa National?” and that is when we kids begin to get up and go to the next part of the night: splurging at National Bookstore. …show more content…
Barely seeing my surroundings as I wait in line, I mentally compute the total cost of everything they picked out. I become the practical person my parents raised me to be as I look at the price of each object, asking my cousins to replace what supplies are too pricey with ones who are worth every peso. I hold my youngest cousin’s hand as the cashier scans all the items. I become aware of the different kinds of people exploring the wonder that is National Bookstore. I observe how the little children cling to their mothers while the groups of teenagers crowd over the romance novels in the fiction section. Each person piques my curiosity, as I try to figure out the stories behind these faces. Despite all this, what steals my attention is a poster with tiny people drawn on a chalkboard, along with the words “Project Aral” scribbled on it. As it turns out, Project Aral is one of the store’s projects in which they give public school students from different provinces a set of two notebooks and one pencil for free. It is in that moment when it strikes me how lucky my cousins and I are to have been granted this kind of privilege. With no hint of uncertainty, I grab a set of the notebooks and place them on the counter. It’s a small step but nonetheless, I feel a sense of accomplishment, knowing that at least one kid would be using a notebook this school year. After gathering my cousins
Each morning, students are dropped off by family or school busses, filling the school with friendly and respectful faces. At Earle Brown I have had the opportunity to interact with a variety
The story speaks the truth an American family who spends Thanksgiving at a foreigner family 's restaurant. The story recounts how the two families come to like one another and appreciate one another 's conversation. This book would be great to read with students as they meet new students from other countries as well as discussing holiday traditions. Age Level: 4 –7, 320 L (Scholastic.com). Aveni, A., & Nelson, S. (2005).
As the United States became more industrialized, the understanding of freedoms began to change. New systems of transportation began to emerge that allowed people to be able to travel quicker, a new economy emerged, and participation in the democratic system grew. Socially and politically the nation altered its concept of freedom, but select groups were still left out. At the turn of the 19th century transportation was being revolutionized as the United States became dedicated to improving transportation.
In the essay “A Celebration of Grandfathers” by Rudolfo A. Anaya, the text uses phrases and words in Spanish to convey the deep meanings of the essay: the respect and warmth the author felt toward his grandfather, and the importance of honoring the older generation. For instance, Anaya 's usage of the first phrase, “‘Buenos días le de Dios, abuelo.’ God give you a good day, grandfather,” in Spanish, not only emphasizes the importance of the phrase to him, but also relays that he carries deep respect for his grandfather (Anaya 240). This expression in Spanish is the common greeting taught to young children to greet elders or other grown adults. Furthermore, the fact that the phrase is first communicated to the reader in Spanish reveals how the phrase is important to what he is attempting to convey.
“My mother would tell my father she was considering fixing chitlins for the holidays. My father would groan, twist his mouth, and protest in vain. ‘Why you got to be cooking them?’ My two sisters backed him up with exaggerated whimpers, calls for gas masks, threats to run away from
“black experience” by appropriating the pain of hundreds of years of vicious anti-black sentiment in the United States. While she can partake in à la carte blackness, and she surely does to some degree, her desire to be victimized for being black signifies that Dolezal craves the complexities and pains of blackness – she does not want to cast them aside. In fact, it is in Dolezal’s best interests to adopt all aspects of blackness, beyond only appearance. Victimization is only one facet; she also attended a historically black university, essentially passing herself off as a black woman to the college in her portfolio and application, worked as a professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, and, as previously mentioned, was head of the NAACP chapter of Spokane.
I was raised in a single-parent household, by my mother, along with my brother. We were economically disadvantaged because mother’s salary was not sufficient to cover the entirety of expenses, or provide for additional needs. Furthermore, we did not have financial support from my father, because my parents were divorced. There were times when my mother gathered financial resources from other family members, and public assistance to pay for expenses such as clothing, food, and utilities. Fortunately, I was able to receive loans and grants to pay for my tuition, because my mother could not afford to.
This year I signed up to go to Feed My Starving Children thinking i’ll get more volunteer hours for the senior Medallion thingy whatever it was called. When I went to the place for Feed My Starving Children, I also went with most of my AVID class. When we got there and walked into the place we had to put on hair nets that were so irritating and most of the girls laughing and complaining about their hair. We also had to take off all the jewelry which i had on, i laughed and said to myself hecky no, all these earring in my ear were staying on. I’m not about to take them out just to loose them later so i hid my ears under the hair net.
In the passage “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan she talks about her Chinese heritage and her love life. The theme of this story is no matter how much a person tries to change how they are viewed on the outside, they will always be the same person on the inside. They have to be proud of what and who they are. So many things can make a narrative interesting and entertaining to a reader. This piece mostly contained concrete imagery.
Jocelyn Fong, an Asian American who wrote the essay “Rice for Thanksgiving”, examines her family’s tradition of eating rice for Thanksgiving and how it represents how she feels in her everyday life. She begins the essay by explaining how the tradition started, but then she relates it to her struggles of trying to maintain her Chinese identity while living in a non-Chinese culture. Fong states that she believes that she is “rice and gravy”. She uses “rice and gravy” as a metaphor for herself.
The passage “Grand Mall Seizure” is the mall’s habits from a shopper’s perspective on the mall. Daniel Alarcon explains what it is like to be in a mall with over 500 stores. Alarcon explains that it is chaos, everyone is scrambling around and it is loud. Alarcon says, “Shopping centers that not only served a community’s physical needs, but its civic, and social needs as well.” (Alarcon, 293)
The article “The Science of Shopping” written by New Yorker staff writer Malcom Gladwell, is based on retail anthropologist and urban geographer Paco Underhill. Underhill studies the shopping characteristics through frequently watched surveillance tapes to help store managers improve the setup of their goods and services. Through those footages he evaluated his observations and the statistics to help define his theories with the purpose to make sellers conform to the desires of the shoppers. Underhill, an insightful and revolutionary man, provides a view of science to displaying merchandise and creates a positive experience for both the buyer and seller. I agree that Underhill’s scientific theories; the Invariant Right, Decompression
A Summary and Response to Andrew Leonard’s “Black Friday: Consumerism minus Civilization.” It all started in the 1960s; Someone thought that it would a good idea to make the day after Thanksgiving a great day for advertising for shopping for Christmas. Andrew Leonard covers this topic of how bizarre shopping has become in recent years in “Black Friday: Consumerism minus Civilization.” Leonard pokes fun at the consumers who rush these stores for the best deals offered up by the crazed advertisements.
They are designed to create more of an inclusive shopping experience where one can find anything from bargain deals on daily groceries at Big Bazaar to exquisite limited edition porcelain figurines at Lladró. It can almost be believed that malls can provide an equalizing space. The ‘equalizing’ nature of this space should be approached with caution; it is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘equal’. On the contrary, most malls become reflective of the socio-political landscape it exists within, and performs this sociality by becoming a site of reproduction of these same relational
Overworked. That’s the closest word that I could use to describe this week. I feel like this journal is going to be about me just bickering, yet there is some stuff you might want to read about. First of all, I have been sleeping three hours this week because of upcoming midterms, quizzes, and assignments due. I am sleep deprived and mentally drained and as my second year in college I have never had my life drained out of my body like a passing shadow.