Shame of the Nation- Paige

Blog Post #4, Rhetorical Analysis and Style Hello again, readers! For this week's assignment, my group read chapters 7 and 8, bringing us to page 215. And for this week's blog post, I'm choosing to write about Kozol's style.  So, onwards.  Kozol has had a very distinct voice and style from the beginning of the book. In my other posts, I've highlighted how he plays into pathos through his storytelling. Now, these are stories that highlight race in American schooling systems. I personally find these stories extremely insightful because these students are more than a statistic.  When talking about such a heavy subject, such as race, you need these stories. Statistics aren't going to tell the story of how young students sometimes aren't able to eat their lunch because of how over-crowded the lunchrooms are, how long the lines are, and how little time there is. (176). That's what makes Kozol's writing so effective. His use of story-telling invokes emotion...

  Blog post #3, Current relevance Hello again, Readers! For this week's assignment, my group had to read chapters 5-7 (pages 108-160)! One of the main topics of this assignment was standardized testing, and as a student who takes the SAT next week and has a lot of anxiety over it, I feel like this would be the most appropriate thing to write about. Kozol starts off this chapter by describing how these schools would set aside large chunks of their school days to drill students for the exams (112-113).  Looking at this objectively, having study sessions for this test doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing, however, reading more into it you see the school's motives.  Later on, we find out that schools that do the worst get posted in articles for being the lowest-scoring schools, and the schools that do the best have their principal earn a $15,000 bonus (122). This shows that the motives behind the schools drilling the kids aren't the kid's education or success, it...

  Blog Post #2: Thoughts Welcome Back, Readers! As you know, the book I am reading for this assignment is The Shame of the Nation  by Jonathan Kozol. This novel dives into modern-day segregation in American schools, better known as, "Apartheid schools".  This week's assignment was to read up to chapter five, bringing us to page 109. In my first post, I talked a lot about how Kozol's style was he used a lot of stories to further his point. He uses this ethos  approach to make the book more genuine and sincere as opposed to just statistics.  In the chapters I read for this assignment, there weren't as many stories, rather one large impactful one.  Kozol tells the story of how he was walking through one of these elementary schools and noticed lots of "HELP WANTED" signs. However, these signs weren't for staffing help, they were so the children could get "managerial positions" within the classroom. These positions would be things like "pen...

Blog post #1, Argument Hello Readers! The Shame of The Nation by Jonathan Kozol is a non-fiction novel that reflects on the differences in the American education system for White students versus students of color. Kozol reflects on his time as a teacher at these "Apartheid schools". (The Shame of the Nation) My group decided to read chapters one and two for our first assignment. This brought us to page 63, which leaves a lot of information to unpack and reflect on. To start a reflection on Apartheid schools, we need to define what Apartheid schools are. Bloomberg.com defines these schools as, "increasing numbers of black children in the U.S. attend what researchers call “Apartheid schools” where students of color comprise more than 99 percent of the population." (Lieb) Essentially, these schools are not legally segregated but are segregated due to economic status and race. Kozol begins the book by explaining why he decided to become a teacher. There were a lot of po...