Blog #1-Rodriguez; Lauren Miller

Although I would not consider myself to be a scholarship boy, I was the oldest child out of three and felt obliged to excel at just about everything. However, athletics were out of the question for me because I have zero athletic skills so I was stuck with doing well in school.

Like Rodriguez, I came home and read a lot, sometimes for hours, and in some ways I am still like that. On a family trip up north, I passed up activities like water skiing, tubing, and swimming in exchange for curling up and reading a book, and in some moments I understand the loneliness he felt while reading. “What most bothered me, however, was the isolation reading required. To console myself for the loneliness I’d feel when I read, I tried reading in a very soft voice (441).” While my sisters were doing things in teams, with other people, I was sitting in my room reading or studying. The drive behind my studies was not the same as Rodriguez’s. My ambition stemmed from competition with my sisters.

Besides the ambition to study and the loneliness we both felt while reading, Rodriguez and I do not have much more in common. Both of my parents graduated from college. There was no discussion about what I wanted to do after high school; it was basically set in stone that I would be furthering my education at a university. My parents constantly pushed me to do well in school starting from the time I set foot in my kindergarten classroom. Education was always important.

I got a job when I was sixteen and my parents put my priorities in a list for me. They always said, “Family first, school second, job third, and social life last.” I think Rodriguez’s family hoped that he would put them first at some point. They wanted to give him more than they got, an education, but they wanted him to stay a part of their family too. “Why weren’t we close, “more in the Mexican style”? Everyone is so private, she added. And she mimicked the yes and no answers she got in reply to her questions. Why didn’t we talk more? (439)” Rodriguez talks a lot about the loss of his family because of his education, but I never felt that with my family. “Family first,” that was always our motto.

Rodriguez put his teachers on a pedestal and looked at them with a huge amount of admiration, almost more than his own parents. “…it was not the occupation of teaching I yearned for as much as it was something more elusive: I wanted to be like my teachers, to possess their knowledge, to assume their authority, their confidence, even to assume a teacher’s persona (438).” My own experiences with my teachers weren’t anything like this. Teachers gave me knowledge, but so did my parents. That’s the way in which Rodriguez and I differed. My parents possessed knowledge just like my teachers and aided me in school like my teachers did. So although I felt things that Rodriguez and other scholarship boys felt, I think I was far from being one. I never felt the loss of my family while trying to succeed academically. They were there to guide me, praise me, and make sure I never lost sight that my family came first.