When reading Olivarez’s text you can see how he used personal experience as an ingredient for the education narrative genre. When writing your own education narrative, you can commence with a question that would be related to your targeted audience. You can also write about how something has affected you whether negatively or positively and how you have reacted to it. The question I have about education narrative is that is there a specific amount of pages, paragraphs or structure that we are suppose to abide by? The other question that I have about education narrative is that where it came from and why is it important as a genre in English.
An educational narrative that I have was back in middle school when I wasn’t doing so go in all my classes especially the core subjects (Science, Maths and English). I had problems with these subjects because I didn’t really have a long attention span and I tend to socialize with people instead of paying attention, to summarize I was lacking discipline from a guardian. In high school, I talked myself through in and had help from my father which was the first time I had stayed with him for over a month. With his guardian and strict lifestyle I started to see some improvement in more work ethic and also my grades. I was filled with joy when I found out that I was one of the best students in my class and now I can prove to the teachers who looked down upon me how wrong they were.
Wow! Lots to comment on here… First, that’s a great story about how your father helped you and how you felt after you started really excelling in class. That would indeed make a good Education Narrative for this assignment.
Second… Actually, first of all, the length should be 1000 words or so, but no set number of paragraphs — nobody can tell anybody how to paragraph ahead of time and it annoys me that students are made to do that! So there.
And second, second of all, this assignment has been around for at least a couple of decades, and exists for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s often easier to write about our own experiences (especially if we’re new to college) than to just jump into harder reading/analysis stuff. We don’t tend to struggle so much when it’s personal; unfortunately, the opposite is true in that when we’re writing to try to impress somebody, our writing gets pretty boring and just awful!
The second thing is that it gives us a place to start if we’re actually looking at composition classes as a way to investigate who we are as writers, how we got that way, what we believe about writing, and what we need to move forward as communicators. Kind of like taking stock for both you and me. Let’s see how you got here, and at the end of the term, let’s see where you’ve gone.
This is a very long response, but I’ll talk more in class on Sept 20 (if I forget, please remind me!). Great post…