Hoop Dreams Response

Hoop Dreams Response

            “Hoop Dreams” by Ben Joravsky, tells the true story of two boys named William Gates and Arthur Agee who have a strong bond and seem to be destined very similar lives. They are both very talented basketball players. The story is their journeys from the playgrounds of Cabrini Green in Chicago to high school excitement and then furthermore to college competitiveness. The first reason these boys are very similar is because of their background, which is also the setting of the book, Chicago. The story takes place at a time in the eighty’s when Chicago was crime-ridden, with drug dealers on every corner and poverty is extremely common. But most importantly are their dreams, they both are chasing the NBA. They’re also both given many opportunities to make these dreams a reality, but getting out of a crime-ridden city is tough, they both try to chase the big life but life isn’t easy and the bumps in the path, small and big affect everything. A huge theme and lesson to be learned from William and Arthur’s true story is to live the dreams that you have for yourself and not those of others. And for your dreams to come true you’re going to struggle. For these dreams to come true both boys face many advantages as well as disadvantages and both have many flaws that all add up to make their dreams a reality. A dream makes everything seem simple but in reality they are very complex to achieve.   

            Both boys seemed to be destined the same future and their dreams were identical, becoming pros in the NBA. Their talent combined with the opportunities, put forward to them as time passed made the NBA seem tiny steps away. From the first moments of the story, a recruiter approaches both boys from St. Josephs High School, one of the most prestigious high schools with Chicago’s finest basketball team. This excerpt shows what the boys had in store, “Recently Big Earl had been having doubts about scouting playground talent. He was starting to think these boys should search out other dreams. But he was in no mood to challenge the status quo, at least not today…. And he still had faith in the dream… Big Earl liked to be pragmatic, and had a built-in immunity against inflating talent. He could see right away, though, that Arthur Agee was special. He had speed and he could jump, but it was a combination of talents and traits that caught Earl’s trained eye.”  Similarly Big Earl recruited William and this is exactly the start of the boy’s journey, their talent was recognized and their future was set. This was the first major positive step to achieving their dreams.  Advantages are there for both boys as they enter high school. They both end up attending St. Joseph’s High School, so nothing could go wrong right? St. Joseph is linked and always will be to a great basketball legend, Isiah Thomas. Isiah is a symbol and was throughout the whole book of their dreams; Isiah was success and leadership, the NBA and fame. With St. Joseph and their talent, the boys were headed upwards. While playing at a freshman game, “‘I think I may have seen the next Isiah Thomas,’ Gleason said. ‘St. Joe of Westchester has a kid named William Gates who is starting as a freshman’”, a famous ESPN announcer says, this is a huge step once, your name is televised, everyone hears it and recognizes you. This is the way college coaches bring their attention towards the country’s finest basketball players. But this wasn’t the end of positive steps for William, who throughout the book has a slight advantage over Arthur of these. William moves on to a point where he has a luggage worth of letters from colleges offering him full scholarships to attend their school. Arthur also gets many letters and is often placed I the newspaper for his highlight games, in fact his wall is full of clippings from newspapers with is name in them.  William plays in the Nike Summer Camp, the biggest of all basketball camps that puts the spotlight on the nation’s best 120 high school basketball players, college coaches attend to see who their highest prospects are and without a doubt all eyes are on William. Both William and Arthur have fine basketball coaches that mentor them to being the best that they possibly can. With so many advantages on their back the road of possibilities is endless.

 William and Arthur’s story teaches that when you’re at such a high point in your life, you can’t be foolish, you don’t want to look back while the road faces forward but you have to learn from your flaws and mistakes and that you need to take advantage of the advantages put forward to you. This is because there will always be disadvantages that will come when you least expect them, you can’t tell if something bad is going to happen from day to day. A basketball career is fragile and little mistakes and flaws can ruin your dreams of reaching the top. And to reach the top, to get to your dreams coming true you have to struggle and you’re going to face disadvantages. There is no doubt that although William and Arthur were faced by many advantages there were also many disadvantages for the both of them and they both have some minor as well as major flaws. For Arthur his dreams start to slowly deteriorate without him knowing it. Not far after his freshman year at St. Joseph’s High School, Arthur is kicked out of the school after his family falls behind on payments. This is where a minor flaw kicks in; a little envy begins to build in Arthur, he says, “How come William wasn’t kicked out, his family ain’t richer than mine”. Jealousy can play mental tricks on your brain; Arthur won’t get far thinking that William is luckier than him. What he should have done as a response was to push harder to make his dreams. This connects to the lesson to be taught by the story, when you have dreams and you face advantages you have to push harder to achieve those dreams. But financial problems don’t end there, day after Arthur’s mom runs from food stamp office to food stamp office waiting in line for hours with the intention of feeding her children and paying her bills while on a low income from work. Arthur’s family was on the verge of complete poverty. This is what got Arthur out of St. Joseph’s and at any time in his life can stop him from moving forward with his dreams. For them to come true he had to prove to all of the college coaches that he deserved a full scholarship, he deserved to have a chance to showcase his talent, but poverty that left him in a public school would hold him back. Another flaw that Arthur shows is slacking on practicing; talent can’t just make it happen. Because of the advantages that he did have, he was forced to think that he was headed to the NBA and that he was the next Isiah Thomas but in reality he needed to work hard if he wanted these dreams to be achieved. Coach Bedford repeatedly told him, “Don’t think that you’re more than what you really are, be Arthur Agee,” in other words live your own dreams and be who you are, you don’t have to dribble behind your back just because Isiah Thomas did, work hard for people to know you as Arthur Agee not the next Isiah Thomas. Life wasn't easy for William either, his girlfriend Catherine gave birth to their baby girl Alicia, when William was in his junior year. As if he hadn't had so much pressure on him from basketball, he now had a baby to nurture. In his junior year, he underwent a serious surgery in his knee that removed his cartilage, when doctors told him that his knee would bother him and he’d have arthritis in twenty years he says, “What’s twenty years, I want to play now”. This is another flaw that both William and Arthur have, thinking that the future is fine, everything is set for them. Here is an example, “As a freshman William thought his days of high school basketball would never end, and now they were over.” Another flaw that William has is staying concentrated. At a crucial moment in a high school game that would keep the season going or end it William gets distracted and needs to remind himself to focus, “I should be focusing on the game.” If he can’t think properly at crucial moments, he can ruin his dreams within a split second. This is how fragile basketball dreams are, the tiniest of mistakes will mess them up. William also has a very bad temper and both William and Arthur begin to fall back on their grades in their senior year, if they can’t keep their grades up, their positions on the basketball team and at graduation are at risk, no matter how good they are or how ever many colleges are willing to pay their full scholarships. Arthur’s father is also a drug addict, not having him home and him being a bad example to follow all add up to being big disadvantages for Arthur.  There will always be advantages in something but equally there will be a disadvantage.         

Dreams are beautiful; everything is simple in them because they are literally what you want. But no dream can be achieved without a struggle, a push of energy that is needed to get you to your dream. Achieving your dreams is like being a car on a hill; it has its ups and its downs. You’ll be faced by so many opportunities but there will be so many struggles like rocks on the road that you need to pass to get to where you want. Your dreams aren't fully set they’re just pictures in your mind, ideas and to make them reality you must work. The true meaning of achieving is working hard and is struggling to get to where you want. Basketball dreams are fragile, a small flaw can tumble you down to the beginning where the same advantages that you had won’t be there. You have to take advantage of your advantages and you have to practice to be better, no matter how good you or others may think you are you can always get better. The flaws that William and Arthur had often linked to their attitudes; they saw their dreams a few steps away but really to get to where they wanted to be, the major leagues, they needed to fight hard.    

Picture of Synthesis Page for Hoop Dreams

Picture of Synthesis Page for Hoop Dreams
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“Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood” Critical Analysis

            “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood” by Sherman Alexie explains why contemporary Y.A. fiction can be good, and is used as a safe haven by young teens and preteens alike, where they can relate their awful experiences to others, that many of the things that critics try to use to ban books happen to children in their everyday lives and how Y.A. books are used by kids to cope with their problems. One thing Sherman Alexie does to support this is to add stories of children who go through many of the bad things in Y.A. books, everyday. These stories are told to him by kids of all ages who read his Y.A. novel. He says, “ A young woman recalled the terrible moment when indifferent school administrators told her that she couldn’t possibly be a teen mother and finish high school… and is now the mother of a three-year-old and a high school graduate soon to attend college”.  With this young woman’s story Alexie is trying to say that she has been through rough times and that she is already immune to the things that are in Y.A.  Fiction. He further goes on to say “it was the student speakers who told the most important stories about survival”. Sherman Alexie also includes stories of how Y.A. books helped teens that suffered terrible things to get through these tough times. He tells the story of a boy destined to fight at war. “ He was seventeen and destined to join the military. Yes, he was old enough to die and kill for his country. And old enough to experience the infinite horrors of war… ‘I want to be myself. Just like in your book.’ ”. This shows that Sherman Alexie’s Y.A. novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, taught this young man to stand up for himself and his ideas. For the same reason, he tells the story of the time he spoke to sixty students who had suffered terrible things and were inspired by his book. Sherman Alexie also tells stories and describes his own childhood, “I think of the poverty-stricken, sexually and physically abused, self-loathing Native American teenager that I was.” He also says, “ They wanted to protect me from sex when I already had been raped. They wanted to protect me from evil through a future serial killer had already abused me.” His support works to make readers of his article feel that teenagers are already immune to the controversial things in Y.A. books and that Y.A. books could be a place where they learn lessons and relate to others.

            Sherman Alexie wants readers to think that Y.A. fiction, like his own novel,  is very helpful to young adults who face similar problems to the ones contained in Y.A. fiction. He wants the reader to look at Y.A. books as a place where young adults go to clear their minds of bad thoughts and can relate to the characters in them. By pushing the idea that teenagers already face terrible things in their lives, Alexie is trying to make the reader think that Y.A. books are okay because they contain things that younger readers are already immune to in their everyday lives. His purpose is to persuade the reader in thinking and feeling that Y.A. fiction is not only okay but also very relatable and helpful to teenagers. His purpose is to inform the reader of the positives in Y.A. text. One technique that Sherman Alexie uses repetitively is asking rhetorical questions. For example, when he tries to belittle Meghan Cox Gurdon’s counterclaim he says, “Does Ms. Gurdon honestly believe that a sexually explicit Y.A. novel might somehow traumatize a teen mother? Does she believe that a Y.A. novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?” Rhetorical questions are meant not to be answered, but instead they are used to strengthen someone’s ideas. They work by getting the reader to think to themselves that there are kids who already find these things normal and when Alexie adds them after evidence for an idea he lures you into thinking “Yeah, does she?” . Even if you’re not truly on Alexie’s side these rhetorical questions manipulate you into thinking the way that Sherman Alexie wants you to. Before asking these questions, Alexie loads his article with paragraphs of teens that faced terrible things in the short duration of their lives. By asking these questions he strengthens these ideas. He uses this technique multiple times throughout the story. Another craft move that he uses to persuade the reader is repetition. “They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books- especially the dark and dangerous ones- will save them.” By repeating his sentence starter Sherman Alexie strengthens his statement to help prove his point. There is a beautiful thing in repetition that makes something sound more believable. It is used in speeches to send a message and sounds authoritative. So, when Sherman Alexie uses it in his article he makes whatever he’s saying sound true to the reader. In this specific excerpt he tries to send the message that young adults turn to Y.A novels, especially when they’re dark,  to help them. This may not be true but when the reader reads it, it has a way of sounding believable. Another time he uses repetition, he also uses another technique by adding multiple examples, he says, “When some cultural critics fret about the ‘ever-more-appalling” Y.A. books, they aren’t trying to protect African-American teens forced to walk through metal detectors on their way to school. Or Mexican-American teens enduring the culturally schizophrenic life of being American citizens and the children of illegal immigrants. Or Native American teens growing up on Third World reservations. Or poor white kids trying to survive the meth-hazed trailer parks.” By adding so many examples, the idea that cultural critics aren’t protecting minorities when taking away books that they can relate to is strengthened. One example could have done it but by using multiple examples he makes sure that you agree.

            After reading, “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood” I’ve realized that there are many reasons why Y.A. books can have advantages especially to those young readers who face horrendous things in their lives. Sherman Alexie did a great job trying to persuade readers into going with his thoughts but I still believe that many of things in Y.A. books can be very explicit and profane and especially hard for some young readers to picture. Alexie has a good point but he can’t take away the actually fact these controversial topics are still in these books.  What I want to know is what teenagers who haven’t faced major struggles in their life think about Y.A. fiction, I know I can find it very disturbing at times.  

Faithful Elephants Response

      In “Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War” by Yukio Tsuchia, the author tells a framed story, a story of a story from years ago that was told to him by a zookeeper one day. The story is about three elephants named John, Tonky and Wanly, that were once at the zoo where the author is told the story , that were ordered to be killed by the Japanese Army during World War II, this is the setting of the story and it’s what influences the outcome of the story. The story stretches along the weeks of their slow deaths. They are starved to death. Again and again they innocently beg for food but nobody is allowed to do anything, it’s no longer in their hands. Weeks later the elephants died. They were innocent and had done nothing to deserve what they had got. Their zookeepers wanted so badly to do something for them but in the end they didn’t. When the elephants die their innocence doesn’t just disappear, it sticks with the zookeepers and later turns into guilt.

The elephants’ innocence plays a huge role over the course of the story. The author describes them in a heartbreaking matter. For instance, “As the days passed, the elephants became thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker,” the way that they’re being described in this specific excerpt makes you feel with the elephants, it has the effect of making you picture them being starved and stuck in their cages. This is another symbol that I noticed that the author uses throughout the story to send the same message. A cage symbolizes being locked in, weak, vulnerable and without freedom, all of these adjectives could be used to describe the elephants. The elephants can’t control whether they eat or not. That’s up to the zookeepers. But the author doesn’t let go of the idea of their innocence too quickly. He uses personification as well as metaphors to stretch the idea, “Whenever a keeper walked by their cage, they would stand up, tottering, as if to beg, ‘Give us something to eat. Please give us water!’ Their small loving eyes began to look like rubber balls in their drooping, shrunken faces.” This effects the actions taken by the zookeepers later on in the story; it’s also what builds guilt in the zookeepers. It also has an effect on the reader to really feel with the animals, almost in a way where you’re on their side and not on the army’s and in a way the zookeepers as well. I know that the imagery used throughout the story(like in the excerpt above) made me, personally,  totally upset with the zookeepers I felt as if I had become part of the story and wanted to tell the zookeepers to do something, this occurred because of the detail used by the author to describe the elephants. It changes the way you look at the elephants, each time they’re described you feel bad for them.

The author makes it evident that the zookeepers want to help the elephants but in this case the authority is not fully in their hands to do so. Their lack of helping will lead to their guilt aforesaid. They want so badly to help the elephants but no matter how much the elephants seem to beg and how much the zookeepers want to feed them, they can’t. This is evident throughout the whole story. At one point their trainer couldn’t stand it any longer, “‘Oh Tonky! Oh Wanly!’ he wailed and dashed to their food shed. He carried food and pails of water to them and threw at their feet.” Of course this action is due to the way that their appearance makes them look innocent. In the same way that the author uses detail to stretch the idea of their innocence, these details are also noticed by the zookeepers and affect them in a similar way. After that point in the story, the zookeepers try hard to ignore the elephants, avoiding passing by their cage. It's a terrible feeling to sort of avoid speaking or conversing with a person, or animal in this case and then having to see them dead. I know, I've been there, my uncle died a few years back and I remember looking back and thinking what you could have done better. In the same way the zookeepers will look back at their actions and regret not feeding the elephants and purposefully avoiding them, it shows me that they have no courage to even pass by the elephant cages; they know that the elephants will lure them into feeding them because of their purity. But the guilt will stick to them as you'll soon learn when you read more into this response and looking back this may have been a reason why this guilt is there.

            After the elephants died the zookeepers ran into their cage, getting the closest they had to the elephants since they were ordered to kill the elephants. I felt that this specific part of the story, the opening of their cages, was symbolic. When it was locked, the cage symbolized being weak and in pain, just like the elephants. With the cage open, it symbolized freedom. From this point in the story I predict that it must have hit the zookeepers that they could’ve prevented this from happening, this is where the guilt begins to come in play. There is a part of the story where they cut the elephants bodies open and this is how the author describes them, “Nothing was found in their washtub-like stomachs-not even a single drop of water.” The elephants had done nothing wrong, like their stomachs’ they were also empty and clean of any wrong-doing. The author emphasizes on their washtub- like stomachs’ that could have been filled with so many things, but they were filled with nothing. “They [the zookeepers] took hold of Tonky’s and Wanly’s thin bodies, as if to shake them back to life. Everyone burst into tears,” this just shows how much the zookeepers can’t let go of the elephant’s innocence.

 The zookeepers had done nothing wrong either, don’t get me wrong, but when things are left in your hands but you have no power to make a decision, you can’t always do what you want. The zookeepers were ordered to kill the elephants by the army. I’m sure that the army moved on after making the decision, they most likely hadn’t put all that much thought into it. But the zookeepers were the ones who watched the elephants as they slipped by them slowly to their deaths. They were the ones in control of whether the elephants ate or not. This is another reason why I believe the guilt sticks with them even though it was obvious that they didn’t want to kill the elephants. I also noticed a small detail at the end of the story that proves this point, "With tears in his eyes the zookeeper [the one telling the story] finished his story….He was still patting the tombstone tenderly.” This shows that the story must be of sentimental value to him, he must have been a zookeeper at the time of the elephants and still the story touches him emotionally years later.

“Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War”, really teaches you that sometimes higher authority can lead you and or force you in a way, to do things that you don’t want to. It also shows you that you’re going to regret many things that you do in life and not everything is going to have a happy ending, where you forget these things. It shows the truth and reality of life. Another message is that when you hurt somebody that’s innocent in anyway, there’s always going to be pain within you that sticks with you whether you meant to do it or not. These lessons can relate to and be very important to teenagers, as myself, you can’t take everything for granted and you won’t always get what you want in life and you’re going to have to live through guilt, regret and tough times.