all right uh hi class um welcome uh so we just finished reading uh the power of books uh by parole seagal um now you're gonna be reading uh independently surrendering by ocean one if it's useful you can follow along with me and this recording i'm going to be reading the essay out loud and also going through the questions that are in the margins one final note before we start i think the best way to go about this um is to have the video open in one tab so imagine your video is here and then the reading opened in another tab when it's time to pause and answer the questions you can just go ahead and pause that video and then go back to the reading also if i'm talking too fast or too slow over the course of this video this is going to be posted on youtube so you can either make the video faster if you want to get through it faster and you can process and understand or you can make it slower if i'm going too fast and you like me to go slower okay we're going to go ahead and get started directions are up here for this assignment you are independently reading this reader history and literacy autobiography in class as you read your highlighting passages that stick out to you in the text like before you will also be answering questions spread throughout the text like this one but unlike before uh you will be reading like a writer directly on the text so if you notice any passages with techniques you would like to use in your own writing comment on those passages explaining what it is from this passage you want to take away and use for your own writing and you should have uh some experience with us after reading the power of books in class okay uh here we go this is surrendering by ocean one reading and writing like any other crafts come to mind slowly in pieces but for me as an esl student from a family of illiterate rice farmers who saw reading as snobby or worse the experience of working through a book even one as simple as where the wild things are was akin to standing in quicksand your loved ones corralled at its safe edges their arms folded in suspicion and doubt as you sink my family immigrated to the u.s from vietnam in 1990 when i was two we lived all seven of us in a one-bedroom apartment in hartford connecticut and i spent my first five years in america surrounded inundated by the vietnamese language when i entered kindergarten i was in a sense immigrating all over again except this time into english like any american child i quickly learn my abcs thanks to the age-old melody when i still sing rapidly to myself when i forget whether m comes before n within a few years i've become fluent but only in speech not in written word okay um we are answering our first question right now uh first question is what do you think the author's word choice here tells us about this experience why do you think he uses the word immigrating to describe his experience all right so this would be a good time to pause the video uh answer this question and then when you're ready you can play again and we'll continue the reading all right here we go again uh we're on to the next paragraph one early spring afternoon when i was in fourth grade we got an excitement in language arts class we had two weeks to write a poem in honor of national poetry month normally my poor writing abilities would excuse me from such assignments i would instead spend the class mindlessly copying out passages from books i'd retrieved from a blue plastic bin at the back of the room the tasks allowed me to camouflage myself as long as i looked as though i were doing something smart my shame and failure were hidden the trouble began when i decided to be dangerously ambitious which is to say i decided to write a poem where is it my teacher acts he held my poem up to the fluorescent classroom lights and squinted the way one might examine counterfeit money i could tell by the slowly brightening room that it started to snow i pointed to my work dangling from his fingers no where is the poem you plagiarize how did you even write something like this then he tipped my desk towards me the desk had a cubby attached to its underside as i watched the contents we're sorry and i watched as the contest spilled from the cubby's mouth rectangular pink erasers crayons yellow pencils wrinkled worksheets where dotted letters were filled in a lime dum-dum lollipop but no poem i stood before the rubble at my feet little moments of ice hurled themselves against the window as the boys and girls my peers stared their faces as unconvinced as blank sheets of paper weeks earlier i've been in the library it was where i would hide during recess otherwise because of my slight frame and soft voice the boys would call me pansy and fairy and pull my shorts around my ankles in the middle of the school yard i sat on the floor besides a tape player from a box of cassettes i chose one labeled great american speeches i picked it because of the illustration a microphone against a backdrop of the american flag i picked it because the american flag was one of the few symbols i recognize all right uh we've read a good bit at this point um if you haven't highlighted any passages to read like a writer right now might be a good time to go back and look for some passages to highlight uh so i'd pause the video and do that um and then once you're ready to play i'll start with our next paragraph all right uh we're at the bottom of this page now through the headset a robust male voice surged forth emptying into my body the man's inflections made me think of waves on a sea between his sentences a crowd i imagine thousands ward and applauded i imagine their heads shifting in an endless flow his voice must possess the power of a moon i thought something beyond my grasp my little life that a narrator named the man as a dr martin luther king jr i nodded not knowing why a doctor was speaking like this but maybe these people were ill and he was trying to cure them there must have been medicine in his words can there be medicine in words i have a dream he mouthed or sorry i have a dream i mouthed to myself as the doctor spoke it occurred to me that i'd been mouthing my grandmother's stories as well the one she had been telling me ever since i was born of course not being able to read does not mean that one is empty of stories my poem was called the boy could dream the phrases promised land and mountaintop sounded golden to me and i saw an ochre lit field a lushness akin to a spring dusk i imagine that the doctor was dreaming of springtime so my poem was a sort of ode to spring from the gardening shows my grandmother watch i learned the words for flower had never seen in person foxglove lilac lily buttercup if a boy could dream of golden fields full of lilacs tulips marigolds i knew words like if and boy but others i had to look up i sounded out the words in my head a dictionary in my lap and searched the letters after a few days the poem appeared as gray graphite words the paper a white flag i had surrendered had written all right i'm going to pause there and then we're going to get into the last bit of this reading if you need time to highlight make any comments go ahead and do that now all right uh you should pause and press play again uh here we go looking back i can see my teacher's problem i was after all a poor student where is it he said again it's right here i said pointing to my poem pinch between his fingers had read books that weren't books and read them using everything but my eyes from that invisible reading had pressed my world onto paper as such i was a fraud and a field of language which is to say i was a writer i have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me awesome uh we got through this reading together uh just two final questions uh you can comment was your answers i should have explained this earlier but one way to comment easily and i will go over this in class as well uh is to just click on the sheet and it should allow you to post your comment remarks uh so you can answer question one here and answer question two in another uh bullet point like this uh so question one uh make an inference after reading this reader history and literacy autobiography by ocean wong where do you think wong got his inspiration for the poem we read in class abad was burning city and if you don't remember that poem uh there's a link right there and you can even hear ocean one read it all right uh question number two at the end of his essay ocean one states uh there's a typo there i'll fix it now you probably won't see it tomorrow uh ocean wong states i had read books that weren't books and i had read them using everything but my eyes what do you think wong means by this what do you think he means when he says i'd read them using everything but my eyes all right um those are the two questions uh this is the end of the video thanks for uh reading along with me um and i'll see you in class tomorrow um or right now if you're reading this right now uh bye folks