Both of the essays were extremely humbling. Both authors talked about the importance of literacy but also discussed how it is not the final word on who a person is or what a person is capable of. Both Rose and Lu ask the reader to put themselves in the other person's shoes and try and understand their issue with literacy, whether its difficulty in learning how to read or trying to understand the concepts of language.
Lu's situation is very different from Rose's in that she was struggling try to understand the differences between the three languages of English, Standard Chinese, and Shanghai Chinese. She began very proud of her "family language" of English until she was taught that the US/Britain were enemies of China and that the foreign language of choice was Russian. This caused her problems about her family language and would seperate her from it for a portion of time. Also, knowing English also put her in a lower class than some of her classmates that were of the "Workers" language. Lu had a very hard time growing up in the New China.
Rose was working with groups of people, children to adults, that Rose calls "Americas 'educational underclass." Rose discusses the issue of literacy and economic status. Many of the people that work with Rose could not get jobs or lost jobs due to their illiteracy. The ironic part of the situation was, I am to assume, that they lost jobs due to the employer assuming that they were unintelligent due to their illiteracy. Rose shows us that the people he works with do not lack intelligence at all, actually it is the complete opposite. Many of the people that Rose worked with were able to figure out questions asked to them once they were given direction and the ability to think.
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With response about Rose's essay I think totally the same way. He made seem like children were perceived so little when they could not do that basic exam. But also did show that those children were not dumb at all that after a little explanation on what to do made those children perform almost perfectly the next time they took the test.
I agree with Marc's views very much. I think he was very sympathetic when writing his blog. He gave his opinion on how he felt about how the authors portrayed tthemselves in the essays.I didn't think of it when reading the essays but Marc says that the underclass lost their jobs because of their illiteracy, but they weren't really illiterate but their employers assumed. It was wrong of their employers to assume like that, which cost those people their jobs and the way they support themselves in life.
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