Week 8: Make Your Home Among Strangers

Introduction

For this course, all freshman were required to read Make Your Home Among Strangers. We were required to read the book before week 8 of class to discuss it and as well as go to the authors lecture. 

Make Your Home Among Strangers

Image result for make your home among strangersI'm gonna be honest, this was not my favorite book to read, but I managed to get through it. The novel is about a Cuban girl named Lizet and her first year at Rawlings University. It follows her journey and shows the issues she faced as not only a freshman at a college far from home, but as well as being one of the only people of color on campus. The author added a fictionalized version of Elian Gonzalez to add more drama into the plot as well as tell a story of a huge controversy in her community and around the world. In the book, Lizet has no support from her famiy as she faces her first year at college. They don't care about her grades and they feel like she would have been better at home. My situation is very similar. My family 100% supports my decision to go to college, but like Lizet's family, they feel I should have picked a college a little closer and they don't really care about my grades. Unlike Lizet, I don't mind this. My family doesn't have to keep updated on my life for me to still be successful. I honestly would not recommend this book to anyone, but I guess it wasn't the worst book I've had to read. 

Lecture

Boy oh boy. I doubt anyone walking into this event was ready for what war was about to go down between the students who attended and even the ones who just watched the livestream. At the lecture the author, Jennine Capo Crucet, spent no time talking about her book. Instead, Crucet discussed the issues she faces when it comes to a primarily white school system and how we must fix it. The speech came to a shock to be because she was very aggressive with her believes and I was honestly expecting a boring seminar about her book. This started to escalate rapidly when the Q&A began. At first, a few small questions were asked about her book. After about the third question a young white girl got the mic and asked Crucet what made her qualified/why she deserved to come to her college and speak. This caused a literal World War III in the audience that went from no one speaking to everyone yelling. The drama didn't stop there. A few students took it to groupchats, twitter, and a few of them even decided it made sense to burn the book they had already paid for. Anyones the lecture wasn't that bad and the girls question, in my opinion, was dumb and unnecessary since Crucet spent 30 minutes of her speech explaining exactly why she deserved to be there. 

Comments

  1. Rachel WordenOctober 11, 2019 at 11:12 AM

    I agree that the one girl's comment was completely unnecessary and the whole thing was a huge mess. I don't agree with everything that the author said and I don't expect other people to completely agree either, but the way certain students acted was way out of line, in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JD CollinsOctober 13, 2019 at 3:03 PM

    I also agree that the comment was not necessary and it was out of place. While students should be able to speak their mind, there is a difference between speaking your mind and being completely disrespectful. It is a shame that she acted in a way which was out of line because it reflected poorly on the university as a whole.

    ReplyDelete

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