"From Bodega Dreams" by Ernesto Quinonez

Writing to Evaluate and Articulate.
Assignment #1 "From Bodega Dreams"

by Ernesto Quinonez

Claim: White teacher are more bias toward Puerto Rican

Students than the teacher with the same ethnicity or heritage background.

Evidence: The evidences inside the article to support

this claim are, the White English teacher's criticise of

using stereotyping words toward his Puerto Rican

students as well as the literature selections in the

English class are also a proof of lack of culture

sensitivity; in contrasting to the Hipanic teacher

encouragement to the students from time to time.

Rhetorical Appeal: This article is narrated by a student inside the same class and also a witness of the tragic incident; therefore, the angle of the writer viewing this accident is full of emotion, which tension of the interaction between teacher and students attracts reader to read on his article.

"the English teacher, Mr. Blessington. He kept telling us boys we were all going to end up in jail and that all the girls were going to end up hooking." (line 2).

Many descriptions of the writer provide his claim of the bias between the relationship of teacher and students in this classroom.

"He looked at Blanca with the eyes of a repressed rapist...He came to school in a suit and tell us that a man with a suit is a man that is valuable and that a man without a suit has no worth." (line 7).

"Blessington thought he was doing us a service, and that was his error. He was one of those upper-middle-class people who think highly of themselves because they could be making money or something, but no, they have taken the high road and have chosen to "help" poor kids from the ghetto." (Line 10 to 14).

In contrasting to the arrogant teacher Blessington, we can see the narrator incline to describe in friendliness about the science teacher who is with Hispanic ethnicity.

"the science teacher, Jose Tapia, was always lecturing us on how fortunate we were because we were young and Latin" (Line 15).

The two victims in this story are teacher Blessington and student Sepo, and the reason of Sepo will be counted as victim is the anger keeping stimulated to be suppressed like this,

"Because Mr. Blessington told me I was going to end up in jail, so why waste my time doing homework?" (104). "He had always been Sapo but that year, after biting Blessington, he started turning into someone who wasn't afraid to die." (107).

Denfend: Most of time, the race is not a major issue for

a teacher to deal with the students, it is indeed the

culture and social class discrimination often occur in the

daily conversation and the ignorance about the cause and

effect to where you are and who are you with that cause

the conflict.

American teacher in this story demonstrate his

vulnerable, insensitive and untrained culture

understanding by continuing showing off his superiority

and intentional surpressing student's heritage and culture

to these students who come from the background of

potentially violence due to untrained emotional control,

non-dominant social classification, which interactions

between two groups continue to stimulate anger to

cause tragedy inside high school classroom.

In addition to this, the American teacher's everyday

insulting erase the original good will of this education

program that try to benefit these Purto Rican students.

The untrained of culture understanding about minority

group put the teacher in dangerous position while he is

more often demonstrating his differentiated social status

toward his Puerto Rican students, the more dangerous

encounter he will be resulted in as the incident

happened later.

Summary: This is an article done by a Purto Rican student as he passive receiving all of offensive talking from his American teacher in insulting his heritage and his culture while teaching them English. To me, this is colony culture which demonstrate the superiority of governing group vs. colonized people. According to the modern world we live right now, the naives of this American teacher has impressed me as the incident happened he is still not realized what mistakes he has been doing everyday to his students that put himself in danger. "Covered in blood and saliva, Blessington's eyes were frozen in disbelief."

After thought of this article: Both the teacher and the students in this article are written in fictional style of drama as regular Hollywood movie, because what teacher's behavior and talking is definitely violating professional code of being a teacher inside classroom, so does to the student's manner be out of control under the authority of school system.

No one as I have seen in public educational system so far would jeopardise their job to say anything unappropriated in public place as a form of insulting that can still continue on pursuing his or her career performance.