"Scholoarship boy"

Rodriguez, "The Achievement of Desire"

In Rodriguez’s essay, “The achievement of Desire” was about a boy that grew up in a different cultural and his family wasn’t there to support him throughout his education because he felt that they were uneducated and un-motivated to read to him. His childhood teachers which were nuns had encouraged him to achieve where he is now. His family has helped him realize who he is and made him stronger in dealing with the pain. He mentions how it seemed like he was living in “two different worlds” meaning that his family life was completely different from his life at school. He loved to go to school and throughout his education has been reading a lot of upper class books which his teachers would brag about to the other students. Rodriguez referred to him as the “scholarship boy”, he read this term in a book he read by Hoggart which was “ The uses of Literacy” which he related his life to the examples in that book. He knew that he was this kind of boy who loved to read and who get a lot of education and someday find the real reason why he done all of this hard work. All his teachers would say “your parents must be proud of you”, but I seemed like he never really shared his accomplishes with his family. Since he felt that they would never understand why he was so motivated to learn.
I feel that the most insightful part of the essay was the motivation that he got from himself to push him further in his education because of how his family was. I could related to that experiences, when your own brother and sister and making fun of you because you do care about you future and your education. You want to do something with your life and these family members are putting you down because you are making them look bad or because they see it as worthless if the rest of the family doesn’t encourage it. When Rodriguez continues to explain his life story of how he became to love reading, he mentions all these books that he read when younger and ones that he uses to relate things back to other books. I think would be amazing, if I had the passion to keep reading and not had so many distractions when I was younger. Reading his article was motivation to me that I need to read more and by doing so I will achieve my goals in life plus just being able to understand my life better. “Two negatives make a positive” is a great way to look at ways things are and how to understand. I feel it is an optimistic way of looking at his family.
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