I thought this was probably the most difficult reading weve done

so far. Not only was it long, but it was also deceivingly hard to read.
By that I mean Rodriguez begins with rather simple personal
experiences of his early childhood that I felt I understood fine. Towards
the middle, he then begins to write with a very abstracted, theorydriven approach that addresses the ideas of bilingual educators. I
dont think I grasped these sections nearly as well as the personal
stories in the beginning of the reading, though I felt Rodriguez did a
good job grounding otherwise too abstract ideas by bringing them to
personal experiences and demonstrating their real significance.
One of these experiences I found fascinating was the attention
that Rodriguez finds himself putting on the speech of lower-class
blacks. Just as he was an outsider in elementary school, so these black
people are outsiders in Rodriguezs present time and society. He hears
in their voices an intimacy that is the result of exclusion, the same kind
of comforting intimacy that Rodriguez found as a child in his Spanishspeaking home. What I find so fascinating about this personal
experience is that Rodriguez has such strong envy for their situation
that a part of him seems to feel that he would take back the burden
and social exclusion of a language barrier if it meant that he could
once again speak fluently and intimately in a family language