Professional Development Paper
Khaliah Moore
4/26/12
Field practicum 2
Assignment 3
So far I feel like I have accomplished many things that will help me out in my future both professionally and personally. To date my biggest accomplishment has been completed my year of service with AmeriCorps. During my year of service I learned so much about the human service field and about myself as a person. After my year of service I was offered a job as a peer educator at a nonprofit agency that I’m currently still working at. At my current job I do rapid HIV testing and outreach. Another thing that has taught me a lot over the last year has been my internship with Partnership for the Homeless.  With both my internship and my job I have a great knowledge of the HIV/AIDS population, problem solving skills and group facilitation skills. After working with this population I’m more open to working with populations that I once did not want to work with. Some skills I would like to gain in the next few years are leadership, case management and harm reduction. I would also like to get experience working with young adults, children and people with disabilities.
Over the last few weeks my goals for the next few years had changed. At first I wanted to transfer to Hunter College to get my BSW because if you get Bachelors in social work from Hunter you only have to do one year for your master’s degree.  For some time now I have been trying to decide if I actually want a degree in social work. When I first got into city tech I was a nursing student, but I didn’t like it so I changed my major to human service. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out a career path that is medical but also human services. My mother arranged for me to sit down with a doctor from her job and he told me to look into speech pathology. I did hours of research on speech pathology and decided that I was extremely interested in pursuing a career in it. So my plan now is to graduate from city tech this semester with my associates in human services. I then plan to attend Brooklyn College where they have both a bachelors and masters in speech pathology. I hope to finish both programs by the time I’m 26 and become a licensed speech pathologist. After getting lessened I hope to work with children in a hospital or school setting.
There are many barriers that can prevent me from reaching my goals such as time and money. More than likely I will be working full time and going to school full time at the same time. Working and going to school full time can be extremely difficult because it can be a lot to juggle. Money would be a barrier for me because the government thinks my household income is too high I’m not eligible for any financial assistance for school. For the past few semesters I have paid my tuition with a scholarship, but it has run out. So I would have to take out loans or pay out of pocket for school. I think my biggest resource is my family especially my mother. My family is very encouraging and supportive. Some resources I need to develop are coming up with different ways to get money for school and find out about different scholarships I may qualify for.
I will be able to tell if I reached my goals if I’m satisfied with where I am in life. So far I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. A year ago I had no clue on what I wanted to do exactly. Now I know for sure what I would like to do and I’m setting myself up for that now. There are many things I hope to accomplish over the next few years and I’m extremely excited about the future.
Literature Composition essay on “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin
Khaliah Moore
April 21, 2012
Perspective Literature
Professor Kanakamedala
Essay #2
Assignment title:Â Â Discuss the relationship between Sonny and his brother. How does each character help or aggravate the others struggle.
In this essay I will show how Sonny and his brother aggravated each other throughout the short story “Sonny’s Blues”, but at the end they came to understand each other through some of the same things that once aggravated each other.  The narrator, Sonny’s brother often tried to get Sonny to change his mind about being a musician, but it never worked. “I just looked at him I was probably frowning a real frown by this time. I simply couldn’t see why on earth he’d want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowning around a dance floor. It seemed beneath him, somehow. I had never thought about it before, had never been forced to, but I suppose I had always put jazz musicians in a class with what Daddy called “good-time people”.” The narrator wanted so much more for his brother Sonny it aggravated him that Sonny wanted to be a musician. As a reader I often felt that the narrator felt that being a musician was not a serious job. He wanted to Sonny to stay in school and enjoy being a young man. Sonny felt there was no point in him going to school because he wasn’t learning anything. He would often skip school to go hang out with other musicians. Sonny’s brother felt that being a musician wouldn’t give Sonny the opportunity to have a decent life he thought it would not pay very much. He tried to convince Sonny, but Sonny wouldn’t listen. When their mother died the narrator set up it for Sonny to live with his in laws Sonny was not happy with idea at first. The narrator informed Sonny that his in laws had a piano in their home this excited Sonny and made his love for music even stronger. In the long run it seemed as if Sonny living in house with a piano later caused him more turmoil in his life he started skipping school to hang out with other musicians. I felt the narrator used the piano to get Sonny to stay with his in laws so he could keep his brother away from the bad influence of other musicians, but it only made his love for music stronger and led him to get into drugs.
Sonny’s love for music caused a huge strain on the brother’s relationship often causing them to fight. “He was a man by then, of course, but I wasn’t willing to see it. He came by the house from time to time, but we fought almost every time we met. I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time, and I didn’t like his friends, and his music seemed to be merely an excuse for the life he led. It sounded just that weird and disordered. As a reader I felt that the narrator wanted to protect Sonny because that’s what he promised his mother before she died. After the narrator heard the story about his dad and his dad’s brother he felt even more responsible for his brother Sonny. When the narrator heard the story of how his dad’s brother was killed he found out music played a part in his death so I believe he feared for Sonny. The narrator had a problem with all of the people that Sonny hung out with he felt they were beneath Sonny and was to blame for Sonny’s drug use. The brother’s relationship really took a turn for the worst when the narrator went to visit Sonny one day in a room he was living in. The narrator felt that Sonny was treating his friends like family Sonny wouldn’t even talk with his brother. This was when the brothers relationship reached a place it have never gone before both bother’s declared one another dead to each other.
Sonny knew his love for music and his life style aggravated his brother and he felt bad about it. Sonny tried to make amends with his brother while he was in jail. He wrote him a letter saying “Dear brother, you don’t know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you a many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so didn’t write but now I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb out a deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside. When Sonny went to jail he often thought about writing his brother, but he was afraid and couldn’t find the right words to say to him. Sonny felt that he had disappointed and hurt his older brother. In the letter Sonny tried to explain how he gotten himself and jail. Sonny told his brother that music was not the cause for him being in jail. When the narrator received a response from Sonny in jail he said he felt like a “bastard”. To me the narrator felt that way because he took so long to write to Sonny and he was ashamed of how poor their relationship was the time.
Although Sonny’s love for music was the main reason the brothers did not get along it later helped their struggle. The narrator realized that Sonny was able to express himself through his music. In the end of the story the narrator and Sonny has a talk where Sonny talks about his suffering. At the end of the talk Sonny convinces his brother to come to a jazz club to hear him play and the narrator agrees. While at the jazz club the narrator gets a chance to see how everyone at the club embraces Sonny and treats him like family. In this point in the story I felt like the narrator finally took pride in his brother’s music especially when Sonny’s friend Creole said to him “you got a real musician in your family”. As the band started to play Sonny showed out. The narrator was amazed that all these people had come to see his brother Sonny play. He felt they he was in Sonny’s kingdom. Although Sonny struggled with the piano at first he got it together in the end. His brother was extremely proud and was brought to tears as well as memories of family members who are no longer living. The narrator even brought Sonny a drink to congratulate him.
By reading my essay you can see how the same things that aggravated the narrator about Sonny later helped him understand Sonny’s struggle. Throughout most of” Sonny’s Blues” the narrator detested the fact that Sonny wanted to be a musician he thought music was the reason Sonny was addicted to drugs. The narrator later found out that Sonny never wanted to use drugs he ran away to try to get away from drugs. Sonny knew his love for music caused a huge strain on his relationship with his older brother, but he couldn’t give music up because music was the way he expressed himself. When the narrator went to the jazz club to see Sonny play I think he started to admire Sonny’s talent. The narrator described the relationship between a musician and his instrument. He thought it was amazing how a musician worked with their instrument to make it do what it wanted. The narrator talked about how musicians had to breathe their life into an instrument. In this part of the story the narrator seemed to have taken pride in Sonny’s ability as musician. The narrator brought Sonny a drink at the end of his performance to show he enjoyed watching Sonny play with the band. I felt the narrator used the drink as a symbol to show Sonny that he now understood his love for music and was proud of him. When I finished reading the story I felt that music was the one thing that caused a rift between the two brothers, but in the end music was the same thing that brought them together.
Power point on affordable housing for my community organizing class.
affordable_housing_commuinty_org
