One of the vivid moments I can recall with reading/writing was when I was reading issue 133 of Ultimate Spider-Man, which funnily enough was a wordless issue. Spider-man (Peter Parker) has always been a personal favorite hero of mine, all variations of him as well, from the edge-lord Kaine to one of the latest iterations in Miles. Issue 133 was part of a larger Ultimate Marvel Crossover event called Ultimatum, in which many, many big name characters died. I remember the issue spread out between me and cousin on his bed, backs against a wall, and slowly flipping the pages of the issue. Normally I read the pages much faster than my cousin, which usually lead me to impatiently bounce my leg or drum my fingers on the edge of the page. He always read each word slowly and took in the entirety of each panel whilst i just wanted to immediately see what happened. The wordless issue helped that as there were no words to read, and to understand what was going on you had to see what the characters were doing, rather than just glossing over in between text bubbles like I frequently did and still do. From witnessing Hulk chase Jessica Drew around, to Drew saving a bunch of people needing help from the flooding occurring across Manhattan, to coming across Kitty Pryde (an X-man with the ability to phase through any object) and searching for Peter. I still remember the mini-gasp and the simultaneous ‘ooh shit’ from both of us when we saw the last panel and saw the tattered remains of Peter’s mask. This was pretty devastating to me at the time, I thought it was the end of Spider-Man forever. Previous characters who died in the series never came back and I believed it would hold true for him as well. At the time I wasn’t yet aware of how comic books periodically kill and revive characters every couple of years, nor the fact that the the Ultimate Universe was more of a spin-off universe and not the ‘Main’ Universe in which most of the Marvel books take place in. Also he didn’t even die, I just got Bamboozled and he turns up alive 2 issues later.
My personal experience with reading/writing
One personal experience that i had with reading or writing was when i read the book “A child called it”. Before i continue with anything, this book was about a boy that would get very mistreated by his own mother and it was actually very devastating to read. I read this book about a summer ago mainly because i had nothing else to do. I remember one of my friends telling me that this book was amazing to read so i decided to give it a try. I remember that i had started reading the book off my phone at midnight and the first couple of chapters weren’t so bad but as i went on i was reading about how his mother would make him starve and wouldn’t give him any food. But then it got way worse to the point where she would torture her son leaving him mentally traumatized and physically hurt. The reason i bring this personal reading experience to attention is because while i was reading this book i just imagined myself in this little boys shoes and just think about all the harsh things he had to deal with all alone made my heart ache. He had other siblings but he was the only one being tortured because his mother hated him for no apparent reason. It made me very emotional and i cried more than three times. And then to find out that this story was based on a true story and was actually written by the little boy that was being tortured. I was in complete shock that a boy that came from such a harsh back round made it big in life and became an author. This was a powerful message to all the readers especially me. I think this reading was really a message to tell us that no matter what happens there is always a bright side.
Sandra Cisnero “Only daughter”
In Sandra Cisnero’s “only daughter” she emphasizes the fact that shes the only female sibling in a family of six male brothers. Throughout her early life all she wanted to do was be recognized by her father and prove to him that she didn’t have to get married in college to be successful. I felt really touched by this reading mainly because she was determined to show her father that she had achieved something great in life that shes proud of. Just because she was the only girl, her father didn’t really seem to give her the same attention as her brothers. But it really touched me at the end of the story when she had recently had one of her stories translated into spanish and had her dad read it, and when he finished it he seemed to be very proud of her and actually wanted more copies for the relatives. This was proof that her father finally gave her some recognition and realized how successful his daughter turned out to be. This sort of gave Cisnero some peace and weight off her shoulders to know that she had achieved the goal of making her father proud.
Personal Experience Essays!
DUE Sept 12: Please post your personal anecdote/experience essays here! Be sure to consult the Unit 1 Assignment sheet (I passed this out in class and I also sent it as an attachment via email) for specifics about the prompt.
For help on writing a post: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/blog/help/writing-a-post/
Unit 1 Assignments Part 1
Unit 1 Assignments Part 1
Annotate “Mother Tongue”
- “I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.”
Learning to speak in the mother tongue is very important for a child’s overall development. Being fluent in the mother tongue, which is also known as the native language, benefits the child in many ways. It connects him to his culture, ensures better cognitive development, and aids in the learning of other languages.
- “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus’–a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
A child’s first comprehension of the world around him, the learning of concepts and skills, starts with the language that is first taught to him. She uses her own way, which is writing, to make a bridge between these two cultures, because she thinks that language has power that we can’t imagine. Mother language has such an important role in framing our thinking and emotions.
- “The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong.”
Mother language has a very powerful impact in the formation of the individual. Our first language, the beautiful sounds which one hears and gets familiar with before being born while in the womb, has such an important role in shaping our thoughts and emotions. A child’s psychological and personality development will depend upon what has been conveyed through the mother tongue.
- “Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.”
Tan is very attached to her mother’s English to the point that she doesn’t want to refer to it as “broken.” To her it symbolizes home because it’s the English she grew up with. She says it provides imagery and emotions that standard, grammatically correct English cannot.
Mother Tongue is about the authors struggles with her linguistic identity, her mother’s “fractured” or “broken” variation of english and the relationship with her mother. At the beginning of the piece we are told about the different types of english she would speak with her mother and with everyone else; we are then told how english wasn’t Amy’s strongest subject and later on we are told about the difficulties her mother experienced because of the way she spoke english and the prejudice she faced.
Tan talks about a few different types of English and in what situations she uses them, but each English form symbolizes something different to her. From my initial experiences and interactions with adults, I began to read words, processing letter-sound relations and acquiring substantial knowledge of the alphabetic system. As I continued to learn, I increasingly consolidated this information into patterns that allow for automaticity and fluency in reading and writing.
