Author: Brook Rideau

In this piece I dive into and explore what it further means to be a sponsor of literacy both for your school and your program/sports team you are apart of. I connect Deborah Brandt’s piece about sponsors of literacy to UD Lacrosse players here at the university. I identify what it means to be a lacrosse player here and what we embody through our everyday lives as striving to be the best men we can be. I also explore other teams and what their sponsors of literacy can be seen as, as well as lacrosse players as a whole in our society. Here is the link to my medium post. https://medium.com/@rideaubr/student-athlete-ud-all-lacrosse-players-portray-many-literary-sponsor-by-brook-rideau-28f21ba2869f?sk=0aff84039e1b5a076723be2a7f4ac851

“There is beauty in this change, the grace and balance found in asymmetry. In two creatures from different species of vastly different size using three legs to move through life: her lack, my excess, this pairing of three.”

Lambeth, Laurie Clements. 2016. 

What I took from The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning “Basics” was that there is a space in which some children might stumble upon, especially those of working class/minority families, where they must decide, at a relatively young age, what is most important to them considering what they know they are capable of and most importantly what their environment is like.

Anthony’s post on “Abstracting from immediate experience” September 19th,.

In this article Matthew Gutierrez writes about how the game of lacrosse has changed and altered these inner city kids lives for the better. How profound of an impact something so simple as the game of lacrosse can have on the successes in one’s life. It shows the true diversity of the game and doesn’t classify it as the normally seen game played by “white” “upper class” males. This article will play an important role in my piece because I will tie it into the idea of lacrosse players and what they sponsor. This will be helpful for me to show that the game of lacrosse is also sponsoring diversity and helping to better others lives. I think this piece will interest others in the class because it ties into our first reading from Lambeth, Laurie Clements. 2016. “The Three-Legged Dog Who Carried Me“. New York Times. It ties into her piece because her Three-Legged dog changed her life and gave it meaning. For these inner city kids they basically had nothing before lacrosse but once they were introduced to lacrosse it gave them a sense of fulfillment and purpose. One kid even states in the article, “I always had the heart and mind to be successful, but I didn’t have the support,” said Davon Johnson, a senior who will attend the college prep school Vermont Academy next year on nearly a full scholarship. Lacrosse “changed my life,” he said. “It helped me find direction.” Showing that this game was able to alter this kids life and put him a great opportunity that he wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the game of lacrosse.

Roxane Gay’s piece “fullness” was very moving and a piece that I enjoyed reading. This piece sided with issues that we have in our society of public discrimination, judging others for looks, and overall lack of self confidence. After reading this piece I couldn’t do anything but feel bad for Roxanne Gay and her experiences with others while she was in public. No one should ever feel as if they are afraid to go in public because they will be called degrading things or belittled because of their physical representation. This being said its very hard to fathom that people are like this but it is the world we live in, insecure low life people have the urge to make fun of other to protect their insecurities. This reminded me of how people can be put in contact zones as we talked about earlier in the semester. Roxane Gay’s piece does a good job in touching on being silenced for her looks, put down, and beat up. At one point she states,

“The truth is that my desire for weight loss has long been about satisfying other people more than myself, finding a way to fit more peacefully into a world that is not at all interested in accommodating a body like mine.”

This quote right here stuck out to me when I was reading her piece. This is because this seen to be a big problem in our world today. Others are so focused on what other people think about them that they need to change their body, change the way the act and do certain things in order to fit in to society. I have never really understood this and this is something that so many people are doing nowadays, so many are following this trend of making others happy first and not finding happiness within. This trend has lead many in our nation to be left lonely, depressed, and overall unwanted by society. Although this is a common theme I still feel bad for people like Roxane Gay, I feel bad and empathize for them because they constantly have people critiquing them, making fun of them, and telling them how to get better. I can side with this and understand how it would lead someone to want to alter their body. Nowadays people are so ready to critique someone else first but when they are critiqued all hell breaks lose. Why is this? Are people nowadays more insecure? Are they looking for power?

Another quote that I found to be very powerful is when she states,

“I had to face the extent of my unhappiness and how much of that unhappiness was connected to my body. I had to accept that I could change my fat body faster than this culture will change how it views, treats, and accommodates fat bodies. And I had to do so while recognizing that losing weight wasn’t actually going to make me happier — which may have been the bitterest part of all.”

This stood out to me because of the way she frazes this, it put it into perspective for me, she states that she had to move her fat body faster than this culture will change how it views, treats, and accommodates fat bodies. As she describes through her text our culture is not the one to be accepting and accommodating of overweight humans in the U.S. I feel as if people are losing the ability to accept people for who they are nowadays and pre judge by looks rather than getting to know someone’s story first.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article with Obama. Even though I have never been the one nor has my family to fully engage in politics, because it would always draw out conflicts that we already did not want between each other, I enjoyed this. This is yet another piece in which we are seeing more integration and racial discrepancy between people. This ties into the ideas that we have been discussing in class about racial backgrounds and racism. Although many people have seen Obama to be a negative figure, you can really see the good side of him by the timeframe that he stepped into office. He stepped into office in order to change and unite the nation in one of the worse times.

 “I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”

This I saw to be a big idea that I took out of his writing when I was reading it. It made me start to dive into the idea of Leadership and what it takes to be a true leader. In order for you to be a true leader you have to have support and trust from the ones around you, in saying this he began to develop that trust just by this statement, of how “we” need to change the nation together. There are still struggles today but Obama does a fairly good job by uniting us americans together and using “we” instead of “me”. Every well oiled team, nation, committee, etc. uses the term “we” instead of “me” and if we are able to do this we can conquer anything.

In Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, she is concerned with an assorted view of topics, such as; nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. She is arguing in which the ways that identity is tied into the way that we speak. She is also stating that people can be made to feel ashamed in their own skin. This could be seen as hurting someone’s sense of face or in other terms their social identity. I found it empowering to see that she had struggles through her since of language and native tongue, she had to suppress her native language in order to get through life in America. This is something that I have had to internalize and deal with since I am from the west coast. 

“Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of Myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.” (Anzaldua 38)  

I like this because it connects to the quote before this one. Through this essay, she tells her story and the realizations she’s made to become the person she is today. This shows how much she grew and realized through the experiences of not being able to be herself. This really is my favorite quote because it can apply to everyone. It just means that you have to be proud of where you came from and your origins in order to truly be proud of who you are. Everyone has different identities and ones that can be utilized in certain situations and some that can’t. For example for myself being from California I am unable to communicate in the ways that I do with my friends back home while I am talking to my friends here. This is because the style of talk back home is much slower and different slang. This is not a negative thing it is just something that I have to be conscious about when communicating with others. Identities are awesome and I feel as if it is something that us humans are working on non stop throughout most of our existence.