Indian Education
Felippe Wancelotti
Mrs. Amelkin
AP Lang
10/4/2012
“Indian Education”
Subject: Sherman Alexie delivers an essay portraying his life from a yearly view-point encompassing the 1st to 12th grade.
Occasion: Indian misconceptions, mistreatments, stereotypes, and discriminations all affected Alexie on his educational highway and served as a basis for the writing of “Indian Education”.
Audience: Alexie’s audience is primarily those interested in the lifestyle of Native Americans.
Purpose: Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination.
Tone: His tone is saddened and bitter, almost as if he feels sorry for those who couldn’t achieve success alongside him.
Thesis
In his essay, “Indian Education”, published in the story collections The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in 1993, Sherman Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination. With the use of clever identically constructed sentences to contrast his academic ascendency with the decline of those around him, powerful segment conclusions to create a spatial effect between different periods of his life in relation to environment and discrimination, and a thematic transition to display how discrimination became imprinted in his mind through consecutive years of mistreatment, Alexei portrays the bitterness associated with the loss of a society.
Writing Strategy
1. Alexie sets the scenes up in separate sections with labeled headings to further differentiate each period of his yearly “life”. His narrative technique provides a spatial effect; each section feels like a new or different period in his life, something that cannot be easily achieved with continuous sentences. He does so to show how rapidly
Mrs. Amelkin
AP Lang
10/4/2012
“Indian Education”
Subject: Sherman Alexie delivers an essay portraying his life from a yearly view-point encompassing the 1st to 12th grade.
Occasion: Indian misconceptions, mistreatments, stereotypes, and discriminations all affected Alexie on his educational highway and served as a basis for the writing of “Indian Education”.
Audience: Alexie’s audience is primarily those interested in the lifestyle of Native Americans.
Purpose: Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination.
Tone: His tone is saddened and bitter, almost as if he feels sorry for those who couldn’t achieve success alongside him.
Thesis
In his essay, “Indian Education”, published in the story collections The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in 1993, Sherman Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination. With the use of clever identically constructed sentences to contrast his academic ascendency with the decline of those around him, powerful segment conclusions to create a spatial effect between different periods of his life in relation to environment and discrimination, and a thematic transition to display how discrimination became imprinted in his mind through consecutive years of mistreatment, Alexei portrays the bitterness associated with the loss of a society.
Writing Strategy
1. Alexie sets the scenes up in separate sections with labeled headings to further differentiate each period of his yearly “life”. His narrative technique provides a spatial effect; each section feels like a new or different period in his life, something that cannot be easily achieved with continuous sentences. He does so to show how rapidly