Amira Webbert

English 1101

Essay Draft #1

The process of learning

When it comes to learning, it can be somewhat simple to most people, neutral, or very challenging. When mentioning someone’s intellectual home, you may think to yourself, a place where a person may feel most comfortable at, a place where one can go to focus or take a break from reality, or maybe a person whom one can speak to about their situation, good or bad.

While Malcolm X intellectual home was focused on learning in Prison, my intellectual home is my room and the process of studying. In order to prove this comparison, first I will explore my own home along with my intellectual home and my ideal intellectual home. Then I will show how my Malcolm X intellectual home was also quite like mine even though it was also very much different. My actual home is very noisy at times as there are five people that I live with including me, and sometimes my other two siblings come to stay over. My current intellectual home is in the comfort of my room. My room is my safe place to concentrate and get all my work done, especially when no one is home, I am able focus more, or I tend to play soft music to keep me relaxed and focused. In “Learning to Read” an excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X intellectual home kind of connected with my current intellectual home because even though his “home” wasn’t very much safe and comfortable in any way, it was still similar as he practically lived with so many people and his get away location was the prisons library where he spent most of his time teaching himself how to read and write and I guess you can also say that it was his safe place too, as for my get away location, it is my room where I spend most of my days studying and getting work done.

For my ideal intellectual home, it will be in a park like garden, filled with grass and flowers, sun shining, but not too hot; something like central park, and how they have this huge garden where it is very quiet, and people can walk through or sit and enjoy the peace and scenery of the garden. My intellectual home and actual home are very much the same since my intellectual home is in the comfort of my own home and I am okay with that (sometimes).

For future reference, I will want my intellectual home to be more then just my bedroom or park themed. Since I will need to study all year round for my specific major, I can’t picture myself in a park while it’s snowing, so I will create a room in my house to be just for working/ studying like an office but less of a boring themed office and more comfortable like because I know I can get distracted/bored quick so I will need the office to be a place where I would rather be even if it’s just for studying and a place where I know I can focus without having my mind wander somewhere else.

Having an intellectual home does not always have to necessarily mean you have to be in school/ a student to have one. Everybody goes through situations in life and anywhere or anyone can be considered their “intellectual home.” For example, if I didn’t have my room to be considered my intellectual home for work, I would consider my father to be it or also just my “person” because besides work, when I need someone to talk to, I know can always count on him to always be there for me and help with whatever situation I’m in. Also, like Malcolm X, while he was in prison, he had a “person” named Elijah Muhammad who was there for him when he needed someone the most both inside and out of prison. Reading and writing will always be Malcolm’s process to his intellectual home, but Elijah was also apart of that process.