Journal Three- Hailey Moore

 Hailey Moore 

English @1:30, M.- W.

September 12, 2020

                                                               Journal Three

I think my active reading is going pretty well, I am finding a lot of personal connections in the books. The vocabulary isn’t super hard for me to understand because I do read a lot of books. What is going well is finding what I need to find like new names, settings, and important passages of the books that really stand out to me. What I am really struggling with is staying motivated and interested in the books, especially One and Done, I like the book, but it's kind of gets boring sometimes. I do like football, but I don’t know much of the terminology of the sport so some of it can get confusing. For me to really get into a book, it has to keep me interested in it enough to want to finish it, and sometimes I am just not in the mood to read, so it gets hard to sit still and read, and not distract myself.  

I think the strengths of The House on Mango Street, is that it has entertaining portions, like a passage on page 37 “Uh-oh, Nenny. Better get the broom. Too much trash in our yard today.”. I think another strength is it does strictly follow the rules for grammar and writing. It focuses more on the topic of each chapter. I think a weakness for the book is that it's kind of jumps all over the place. It's more of a collection of different stories from Esperanza’s childhood, there is also so many names in the stories that it can be hard to remember them all. The strengths that I see in One and Done is that Maurice is very honest about all the things he knows he has done wrong in his life. He doesn’t hold back, and he shows his mistakes and him maturing and seeing that he wants something better for his future. He doesn’t deny the fact that he wanted and was going to murder the witnesses. I really liked the honestly. I think a weakness was that it can be hard for me to stay super interested in the book, it can get very dull and the chapters are very long, but that is just my opinion.  

    A question I had was, did he want to go to the college for the coaches? What did he think he wanted to study in college when he was a senior in high school? What I really realized that stood out to me and was very important was his growing level of maturity through chapter 4. He was talking about an old friend of his, Juwan Phifer, was sentenced 18 years in prison for robbery and assault. This really put into perspective for him that he could've been in that position if he did not get his act together. I think without football he might've already had his third strike and been in prison too. He wasn’t interested in involving himself with crime or selling drugs. He wanted to go to college and get an education. He wanted to use his talent and love for football to get him out of Youngstown. I think this really showed him growing up. His brother Marcus went to college too to play football in Buffalo.