The 2nd reading stuff

PrOJect MUSE

After reading everything for this week, I did not agree with Frank Mathis, I do not believe that you can really judge a memoir. All memoirs are good in their own way. Many of the personal stories that I read help me understand people better. Like all the stories of the students from New Orleans. Those ones teach lessons. The other style I saw was the FSU memoirs, they were very different in telling life stories.

Narratives from students at the center, That does not sound to interesting at all, until I sat down today and started to read the short stories without getting up once. In the Journey to a memory the strong metaphors and tragic mood creates a powerful story about everything being gone. These authors all have stories about moving on, and it is easy to see why they would do that. The lifestyle in New Orleans is hard and sad, and it is a long uphill climb for many of these people.

Maria Hernandez already had a hard time before the storm, she was trying to survive and help her school improve. When the school finally has some success, the storm comes. She goes through lots of horrific ordeals and the problems keep on building up. She has a very sad, and hard life. She feels betrayed by the school board. But from all these problems we realize she is a strong girl who fights though everything even with all hope lost.

Another student Janay is scared of the unfamiliar and does not want to know what happened. She compares the destruction in her house to death. Eventually she found comfort in the familiarity and the only way for her and everyone else to move on is to try and survive. She knows she is helping New Orleans just by moving back there.
Seeing a adults perspective brings allot of thoughts about writing and students thoughts about tragedy. Students first showed lots of hatred to the storm for all the damage it has done. Students did not want to talk or write about it. But when students wrote about their already hard lives, they were able to bond together. Katrina brought a lot of problems and unfamiliarity. Many students did not know their classmates which created tension within the classroom. But instead of writing about Katrina and their memoirs they read about them so they could understand other people have problems to. It is always easy to read something you can relate to. The stories brought the students together because they could understand each other, they all had good and hard times. One of the lessons I learned is that being productive after some destruction in your life helps you. But the students needed to be motivated to be productive. The bored students created such a different atmosphere because of the test review they had to do. They were not trying in class and many failed the GEE test. Once the students were able to reindentify themselves by writing memoirs again, the productive atmosphere was created again.

Why is Melvin able to not be phased by the storm?
Maybe since his level of tragedy he could take was so high because his Dad got shot, everything else that happens is " under the bar" and does not affect him. There are lots of strong characteristics in humans around the world today. I would like to learn from these kids because I know I am not that strong and I do not know how many people are mentally strong enough to handle this. Would you want a tragedy like this to happen so you could become stronger because of it? and How do you plan on helping Katrina victims in the next year?