ABSTRACT
The evening’s book club began in consternation. We gathered to discuss Richard Rodriguez’s book, Hunger of Memory. It took awhile for the conversation to find its way to the book. The club members were preoccupied by the pressures of their first parent conferences. Gradually, our discussion of communicating with parents encircled themes raised in Rodriguez’s book, especially the complex relation between home and school when a child is learning at school in a new, second language. We lingered on the section describing “the scholarship boy” and the duality the image poses between home and school, private and public. Rodriguez (1982) says, for example,
The scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed. With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s consolation in feeling public alienation. Lavish emotions texture home life. Then, at school, the instruction bids him to trust lonely reason primarily. (p. 46)
As was discussed earlier in this book, as part of the “dominant culture,” the members of our book club are comfortable with this trope as it explains other people’s children. Most of us at the table experienced the transition from home to school as a relatively seamless one compared to the identity-wrenching transition Rodriguez describes. No change in language code was required of us, and we felt that family life groomed us, if not for university life, at least for going to elementary school.
