The first chunk of Miles Corwin's And Still We Rise illustrates how students attending Crenshaw High School in South Central maintain superb grades with all the hardships they endure at home. Prmarily using anecdotes and description Corwin explores the lives of gifted and talented students. Many of the students who attend Crenshaw are forced to deal with situatons beyond ther maturity level. Characters such as Oliva are faced with abusive parents,full tme jobs, and chaotc foster homes.Others such as Sadikifu have went from being a mischiveous teenager, to a gang banger, to a gifted and talented student.Toya has to sacrafice her good education to take care of her child while Venola wrks to jobs to help her mother pay the bills. Miesha on the other hand only has her brother to lok up to for support. With all of these mishaps students are additionally forced to deal with bickering between teachers, constant gang violence, and the end of affirmative action.
Discussion Questions
If the bok was not primarily anecdotal, would it be as interesting?
How would you deal with the situatons these kids go through?
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If the book lacked the anecdotes, it would probably be more filed with facts and statistics and it would not be as interesting. Instead of really exploring the ideas and experiences and obstacles faced by these truly extraordinary students, the book would be nothing but numbers and no personality.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the situations that the students face, only experiencing them would allow me to truly know how i would deal with them.