Initial Response: Achievement of Desire

Same problem with generalizations as the other essays. So many people seem to think that their experience is representative of some whole and by examining their own lives they can find some sort of system of grading or classifying every other life. It’s obviously not that simple.
Is this what we’re supposed to do for a personal essay? I’d feel strange talking about myself so much when there’s so much to learn from external sources, but I guess I’ll try to relate this to myself.
I went to school at Borah High School here in Boise, and Garfield High School while I lived in Portland. Now both of these are fine American schools, but both are, for their area, the “troubled schools.” Troubled with low tests scores, drop out and pregnancy rates, fights, and such. A suburbanite’s nightmare. At both schools i had a lot of Mexican-american peers, I saw a lot of them put forth so much effort at something that was so easy for the white kids. I’ve thought about the stark contrast between their home life and school. I’ve seen Mexican immigrants here have their young children translate for them. It must be strange. The young child with a knowledge their parents don’t have. The parent pacified by this as their child learns and is allowed into a new world in a way they never will be because we can change their kids to be enough like us that it’s okay. But they, the parents of those kids, will always be outsiders.
Back to the essay at hand:
He seems to like to think of himself as a man with tact. The part where he discusses the silence between him and his mother reminds me of an episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, where they discuss the mid-early teenage rift that grows between children and their parents. An awkward area where the child doesn’t know whether or not they can agree with or support their parents anymore, maybe they don’t know how to explain that they’ve changed, or been changed by the things they experienced at school.
Another motive he doesn’t cover for his “scholarship student’s” desire to achieve is escapism. Whatever the books and learning represent, they are an escape from where he was or is.
I wish he would talk about his mother and father’s stories more, they honestly seems a lot more interesting than his. It is sad when his mother gets demoted from her job with the governor over such a ridiculous mistake, but the father’s story is especially sad. I have a theory that people become broken like colts until theyre okay with the mediocrity of their lives. You can almost see this happening to his father, when he stops speaking of being an engineer.
For some reason when I read the part about losing his diploma and his father finding it, I pictured the father actually just taking it. I mean who loses a diploma? Especially the academic-obsessed.
I’m on page 576 and I keep zoning out. He’s just been reiterating the same crap for the last two pages. It’s like he’s trying to find the point he’s going to make by rambling and hoping something comes up. I definitely don’t like the essay. These guys need to look into the concept of brevity.
His writing style is pretty bland. His paragraphs though are aimless. I don’t even really see the point in his dividing it into three sections, because they all seem to cover the same