Thursday, March 6, 2008
American Dream- 512 offers some great stories
Those of us who took 512 with Miller last semester had a dose of the American Dream. The books we used provided some great supplemental texts that could be used and they vary in voices. From immigrants to diverse gender and what the American Dream is or what they thought it was....I think many of those stories could be used.....I'll have to go through my books and get back to you with some specifics.
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I will also go back and look some of those titles up. Chapter two of Cultural Reflections by Gaughan focuses on an American Dream unit and I believe suggests a few titles he used with students. I will look up the specifics and get back to you :)
I have been going through A Multicultural Reader, Collections One and Two which were used in class. In Collection One, Field Work (p. 307) by Rase del Castillo Guilbault talks about a migrant family that works in the fields. A young girl and her mother decide to pick in the garlic fields to earn money for bus tickets to visit family in Mexico, but the work is hard on the eleven year old girl. She realizes that she cannot accomplish this task no matter how hard she tries, and her tired father coming home after a long day's work decides that the whole family must chip in to get the work done. The family finds joy in eachother's company as they work into the night, finding happiness despite the hard work. I think happiness in the process of growth is something Gatsby never considered. Whereas this family found contentment in the present, Gatby's building of wealth was for one unreachable happiness that was already too far gone, or even possibly which he never had secured in the first place.
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