Brenda Sanchez

Ali. M. Meghdadi

Writing 39C/Section 33374

27 April 2014

Reflection Blog- Week 4

 

At the beginning of class whenever I thought of the definition of the word better, I came across ideas regarding making something better, it was actually hard being able to define it, it was more of something that I could use in a sentence. While reading the text Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande I decided that I would look up the definition and found four different definitions, it as an adjective, adverb, noun and verb, ultimately in this class it is used as a verb, “improve on or surpass”. However I have realized that it is hard to have a single definition for the word better and that after watching the TED Talks and reading the book, I have an understanding on what it means. Better is unraveling a problem from different areas and change them to have a positive result. Better does not mean just improving on one specific thing, but improving and multiple things and better does not always mean, “improving” it can be rethinking an idea or action and completely change it.

            In my case, I am talking about the problem of Mexican assimilation in the United States. In my essay I notice that I do not have a specific time when the problem began and I know that is a problem. I was having some difficulty deciding where it is appropriate to start because the problem has began ever since the Americans offered jobs and the Mexicans came in search of them. However I do not want to write as far back so I am going to look into when it started getting extremely hard. I am going to focus in on what caused the world to change, which can include the downfall of the economy, the shortage of jobs and other things. Although I am being more specific on other things such as gender roles and education I can incorporate problems and solutions such as the Dream Act and other laws. My problem has a start but the start will be distinguished by when it became something huge. Since my problem revolves around how it is hard for Mexican Americans to assimilate to the United States of America’s culture as well as keep their own, it can begin at the point of migration of the parents from Mexico to America. I need to narrow this down to a specific time period; specific years ago and can focus on when society became aware of it.

            If I decide to focus on the time period when society and the awareness began to rise it would be a good start because it allows the audience to have some connectivity with it, as opposed to if I write about a while ago people will be unaware of the situation and can get bored of my essay since I would have to go into detail about all the changes and problems there was. I can look at the roots of the problem and go from there.