Part A :
Passage: “The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent to errands, I always took my book with me, and by doing one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return.” Page 1 paragraph 4.
Douglass took action on a plan he had created which turned out to have the best results. The plan involved him becoming the friend of many white kids. He would then try and make as many of them as possible teach him. After a certain point with their help, Douglass would have finally learned how to read. He would take a book with him when running errands. He would finish quickly these errand to get time in order to read and learn before he would have to go back. Fredrick Douglass knew that he could use these kids lack of racial biase in his favor in order to get them to teach him. He also knew how to manage his time with errands in order to utilize the spare time for reading.
Part B
One thing that has been hard on my educational journey is my lack of motivation. My lack of motivation is the thing that holds me back the most. With a lack of motivation I found myself not caring about my education and the responsibilities that I have with it. This lack of motivation made me lazy, and due to this laziness I stopped going to school or stopped doing work for school. Everything would spiral out of control just from the lack of this one thing and I would remain a mess, unorganized, and late with everything.
One day I found a way to cope with this. That way would be to find motivation by learning to value the privilege that I have. The manner I did this in would be by remembering certain things in my life such as the hardships my Mom has went through and the stories she told me that would include her lack of study and how she deeply wanted to study. I would also remember the different things I saw in the town my parent were raised in, in Mexico. One of these things is how kids would be unable to study for the reason they had to work at such a young age just to make ends meet. The second thing I used was my first hand experience in physical labor on my vacation to see what a life without study would have brought in that town. This would show me huge burdens and stress one dealt with. Through this strategy I understood more better my capabilities due to the fact that the lack of motivation would be less of a problem therefore I would be able to manage more.
Excellent in Part A!
Excellent in Part B — I love your strategy of seeing your own privilege as motivation. Your answer makes me think of myself. Yes many of our parents did not have it “as good” as we do. My dad used to tell me — when I complained that I wish I was going to a private selective college and I was only going to State College — that he had to study with a candlelight during the war and that I was lucky lucky to have no such hardship! So instead of complaining I needed to focus on what I was getting — an education with no need to work or struggle — just study. That’s a luxury.