Nathaniel Thibaud

After reading Howard Gamer’s “Five Minds of the Future” and Esmeralda Santiago’s “When I was Puerto Rican”, I believe that Santiago’s essay was more enjoyable than Gamer’s essay. Santiago’s essay was not only much shorter, but its story was more interesting to follow along while reading. While going through Santiago’s essay, I was hooked on her school experience, her arguing with Mr. Grant to let her go into eighth grade and then finally compromised to let her take eighth grade classes until December to see how she does. Santiago worked hard and ended up surprising her peers and teachers by scoring high in the English, science, and social studies midterms, proving that she was as smart as she said. Although Gamer’s had a good essay and had nice structure, for example, separating his essay into different parts based on the topics he wrote about, and including a pre-reading. I found myself scrolling through the essay often trying to figure out how much more I had to read.