In my reflection, I chose Maya Angelou's Graduation, Nancy Mairs' On Being a cripple, and Chang-Rae Lee's Going Home Again. Maya's experience as she graduated from the only black grammar school is described in Graduation. The essay from Maya Angelou's autobiography goes into length about the discrepancies in schools for whites and blacks. On being cripple discusses the challenges of existing as a crippled person. The essay provides thorough information regarding the long-term impacts of multiple sclerosis that Nancy Mairs experienced as a result of her crippled state and the subsequent diagnosis. Going home describes the author's relationship with his mother through food. Challenges of the Readings
I found no real problems reading Graduation by Maya Angelou. This is because the author of the essay tries to give a vivid description of the occurrence of events as she was in school. Furthermore, the description of events helps to share in the excitement she had as she prepared for her graduation. The continuous prose and diction in the essay makes it easy to try my best while reading through the article to comprehend the relation of the events. With the flow of the story, I felt the urge to read more and more to know how she managed to get through the blacks’ school and got to graduate. The author explains how everyone was willing to offer a helping hand with the preparation of the graduation day.
On reading On being crippled by Nancy Mairs, I got destructed. This was because the sentences that the author used in the essay were complex and needed the effort to comprehend. From time to time it was important for me to consult with my dictionary to understand the vocabularies that were within the essay. The Fonts style and size were also too tiny, so I had to strain to avoid skipping some of the lines in the paragraphs.
While reading Coming home again by Chang-Rae Lee, it was so easy and silly of me to get destructed. This was because in so many instances the author made rich description of food. These descriptions served to create the image of the food the author was talking about and forget what I was reading. On several instances, the author also flashed back on events in his life while talking about his mother’s illness; this made it difficult to read through or remember where I got destructed while reading the assay.
Highlight of Readings
From the essay Graduation by Maya Angelou, I learnt a lot that I can attest that make it worth it to read the essay. The essay gave me a key insight that different thoughts can be devised from a single thought that leads to a reaction that helps everyone understand you best. She designed the idea of graduating from a blacks’ school that had only two classrooms compared to the whites’ school despite the difficulties she went through. The essay On being crippled by Nancy Mairs gave me a critical insight into a crippled life. The idea changed my perspective and helped me comprehend that disability can never be any close to inability. Nancy Mairs continued to do a whole lot of things even in her crippled state even though she could not do few things she did before.
Question to authors
Maya Angelou was over excited about her graduation that she could hardly wait for the day to dawn, so if I had the chance to meet her, I would ask her how she would have felt if at all the graduation day would have been postponed or rather canceled from the actual day it was set. If I were to write my a personal account, I would write about the difficulties of surviving in a Black Country. It would be similar to the Graduation by Maya Angelou.
