AP Language and Composition
Finn/Loun
“A primary reason for my success in the classroom
was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing
me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before
becoming a student.” (47)
“For although I was a very good student, I was also a very
bad student. I was a ‘scholarship boy,’ a certain kind of
scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always
unconfident. Exhilarated by my progress. Sad. I became
the prized student – anxious and eager to learn. Too eager,
too anxious – an imitative and unoriginal pupil” (44).
“Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic
success distances him from the life he loved, even from
his own memory of himself” (51).
“If the scholarship boy, from a past so
distant from the classroom, could
remain in some basic way unchanged, he
would be able to prove that it is
possible for anyone to become educated
without basically changing from the
person one was” (70).
“If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally
separated from my parents, my education finally had
given me ways of speaking and caring about that
fact” (77).
All quotes taken from:
Rodriquez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Bantam Books: New York, 1982.