Rodriguez Précis

Sean Tucker
Professor Mary Boland
English 329
27 January 2009
Rodriguez Précis

Rodriguez, Richard. “The Achievement of Desire.” Hunger of Memory. Scribd.com, 3 Apr. 2008. Web. 25 Jan 2009.

In “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez reflects on his experience as a student from grammar school through his life as a graduate student. He explains that he was the type of role model student that the teachers loved—always reading, asking questions, and listening to their every word. Other people would often say to him, “Your parents must be proud.” Despite all of the praise and recognition Rodriguez received, he explains that he was “a bad student” and was “unconfident” and “sad.” This paradox comes from the way Rodriguez described himself as a “the scholarship boy” who is “an imitative and unoriginal pupil.” Rodriguez came to this conclusion when he read Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy while searching through various Education texts to find something written about students like him. He felt he had changed dramatically from what his parents were and what he was before he began to progress through school.
What happened to Rodriguez was that as he progressed successfully through school, he began to drift further away emotionally and physically from his parents. His parents were working class Mexican immigrants that could not speak English very well and were not educated in the traditional sense, i.e. it appears that they may not have been high school graduates. Rodriguez’s education began to make him feel quite different from his parents and he was “least prepared for the change….he goes home and sees in his parents a way of life not only different but starkly opposed to that of the classroom. (He enters the house and hears his parents talking in ways his teachers discourage).” He was angry about the differences between his parents and himself but then became engulfed and enraptured with his education. He knew he was different but he still embraced his learning and he pressed on. It wasn’t until he realized that he belonged to a very lonely academic community, the ones that spend hours in the library without uttering a word to anyone or making any kind of friendly gesture to the one sitting next to them, that he decided to take a break from his dissertation and stay with his parents for the summer. He still had the realization that he was different from them, but he was “relieved by how easy it was to be home. Yet, he still “remained an academic” by constantly contemplating his relationship with his parents and how they did not do the same. Conversely, his way of thinking, due to his educational background, did allow him to do this and without it, Rodriguez feels that he could not and would never realize the importance of it. In the end, he realizes that his realization of this and his “desire of the past” had indeed completed his education.
What was most insightful for me in this piece is that although Rodriguez knew he was changing and becoming so different from his parents, he still pressed on with his education. He admits that he’s no genius. In fact, he claims quite the opposite. He claims that all he ever did was regurgitate what his teachers and professors taught him, i.e. he had no original thoughts of his own. However, I feel the opposite. Indeed, Rodriguez had been building himself into the accomplished writer that he is today. He failed to realize that he was going through a learning process that involved practicing skills and, yes, sometimes imitating those that were accomplished in these skills in order for him to develop his own original thoughts and ideas. The point here is that no one learns anything in a vacuum of complete original thought. Instead, we learn from others that we admire and learn from those we dislike as well. I fell that if students can learn this point and not worry about how dull or imitative their writing is, then, perhaps, these students will feel free to just write and not be hindered by the constraints of or their attempts at originality.