While I was reading Black Shack Alley, I honestly thought this was going to be another cliche novel where a poor kid goes to school, works hard, and has a good life. END OF STORY. But as I kept reading and after I watched the lecture, I realized the author wasn’t really focusing on the education or development aspect to be the main outcome of the story at all. It was also interesting when we really look at the value education has on his life. Jose finds that, to have a shot at having a good life, he needs to go to school. But going to said school pulls him farther and farther away from his own community. There’s even a part in the book where he isn’t able to explain what his grandmother’s line of work is in French. This says a lot, without explicitly saying anything. I feel like the system undermines not only her as a person, but also the blood, sweat, and tears she put into making his education a possibility. His identity also seems to be getting shifted away from his roots. Rather than learning new and exciting things, he’s being reshaped into a new order of structure that doesn’t recognize where he comes from. The lecture further brings this point home when the professor goes into literacy vs orality. We know that Black Shack Alley has it’s own culture. It’s own people, music, stories, and wisdom passed down. But when he starts reading, he realizes that these books are fully disconnected from his own reality. Full of white people and settings. He even gets accused of plagarizing because this life seems so alien to them. Oh, and another thing that stuck out to me was the emotional weight I felt when the book went into talking about how his mother was working so much to support his education, and how disappointed she felt when his first report card was full of mediocre grades. I feel like many people can relate to this, especially asians, where their parents were first-generation immigrants to North America. They left their stable jobs in their home country to come here and work hard just for a chance that their kids would be able to have a good life and education. Most kids would probably think that “it’s just grades” and “it’s honestly not that big of a deal” but its more than that. To Jose’s mother, they represented whether all of her effort, exhaustion, and sacrifice were actually worth it. In the same way, for immigrant parents, grades aren’t just grades but proof whether if their struggles mean something. Those are just my thoughts though. The question I had this week was: How do his mother and grandmother’s sacrifices change how we see his education?