In the first chapter of Conroy's book, I learned about the background of Conroy and the area in which he would be teaching. I felt that the first chapter really showed so much about his character and the reasoning behind his teaching. This chapter left me wanting to know more about Conroy’s childhood and the real reason he wanted to teach. I thought that the way Conroy talked about the years that he taught in the high school were really great. The description that he gave of the African American students and how they really felt after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead on. That is how African American’s felt during that time period. They were angry, mad, and felt threatened by most whites in society. And perhaps they had every reason to be. I believe that’s why I picked the following sentence as the best written in the chapter. It connected the Jewish and the African Americans. Although their situations were totally different, and should not be compared, one could agree that both parties could relate.
Most well written sentence:
pg. 11 "I stared at the furnace where Jews were reduced to piles of Jewish ash and felt that I stood on holy ground, a monument to the infinite inhumanity of man and society gone insane, a ground washed by thousands of gallons of human blood, a ground astir with ghosts and memories of Jews and Germans trapped in a drama so horrible and unreal that the world could never have the same purity again."
I chose that sentence from the first chapter because of the imagery that it painted in my head while I was reading. I absolutely love history, and German history during World War II is my favorite time period. I related to this quote because I've seen images of what happened at concentration camps. I understood how he felt. The sentence just stood out to me, over everything else in the entire chapter.
One of the questions I chose to answer was what makes you wonder in this book? This book makes me wonder what will be happening next. Conroy's way of writing makes me wonder how he will be able to impact the children in the school he'll be teaching in. Or if he will have an impact at all...
