I feel like I can relate to Rodriguez, but not on an educational level. I can relate to the fact that I am a first generation college student. It can get tough when you bring your curriculum home and your parents cant help you because it is too difficult. Even though they did not move onto higher education, they push me to go as far as I can, they obviously want the best for me. One of the main reasons I want to become a teacher is to push the kids forward in their education, because some may not have the kind of parents that push them to excel. I would like to be that teacher that gets a child involved with science and have them realize they want to be a chemist, or even a teacher down the road.

I was never a “scholarship boy”. Growing up I was having fun, being a kid, sure I read but I did not always put that first. As I got older, I would read more books on a regular basis. I knew that most of the books that I have read before were basically just sitting in my head till I had to take a test and then my brain would regurgitate it and then it seems like it could have been lost forever. The way that Rodriguez dealt with his readings is he read a bunch of books, just to say he read them. Even though he couldn’t wrap his head around Plato, he could at least say he read it. “Most books, of course, I barely understood. While reading Plato’s Republic, for instance, I needed to keep looking at the book jacked comments to remind myself what the text was about”(444). I mean sure it is nice to learn something new, but when you delve yourself into something so comprehensive that you basically get nothing in return from reading, it is just a waste of time.

I think that where Rodriguez grew up and the time frame of when he grew up was influential on his life. He was young, a minority, and living in a time when more and more people were starting to accept other ethnicities. I think that did play a part in his life. He was pushed to do well, but people, even those in his family occasionally mocked him. He thought that it could push him to do better; he thought that as long as he kept reading he would be getting smarter. But there are things like being a child that he really didn’t go into, he most likely missed out on a lot of opportunity that kids are given these days playing outside. Having said that I was never a “scholarship boy”, I still always tried in school and always thought that it would take me somewhere, but I never thought of school being so overpowering in someone’s life that it would stop them from being a kid.