Five months and thirty-five classes later, my first college English class, ENG 111, has come to an end. During that time, I have learned a lot of things that have helped me become a better writer every day. The days we dedicated to playing scrabble, also known among us students as “Wordplay Days”, not only helped me with learning new vocabulary, but also helped improve the vocabulary I already know. Fun-fact I have never played the game scrabble before I started English class with Dr. Lucas. Ever since then I make my family and friends play it with me constantly. My most significant work during the semester was a literacy narrative. In which I told the story of how I learned to write my name. Clara, A Mentor, Teacher and Sister, offers a thoughtful and engaging look on the vital role that Clara, my sister, played and continues to play in my life. This is one of my first writings which I especially focused on sensory details and have learned how to create an exceptional essay. After passing our graded essays back, Dr. Lucas always encouraged us to present our piece of writing which we had posted on our own personal blogs. The presentations of the student’s blogs did not only bring life into our eight-a.m. class and were therefore highly appreciated, but also gave us students healthy examples we could compare each other too. Most reading assignments were instructing to read a chapter or two from the book Educated written by Tara Westover. Reading only one to two chapters at a time made me actually want to finish the entire book, although I have never finished a book written in English. Educated was relatively easy to follow. The Westover’s story and the sensory details truly kept you intrigued throughout the book sometimes even making me read three to five chapters at a time. There are plenty of strengths and weakness in English and Writing which are compelling and are common in the real world. Whether those strengths or weaknesses include grammar, composition, punctation, or spelling. These subjects require improvement overtime and are a learning process. The more I wrote in my journal, the easier it got.

English and Writing are excessively used every day, through school and college. Both subjects are necessities to pass.  Gradually involving will help the student find sentence errors, using different sources, and most importantly how to write a good essay. As Tara’s older brother said: “Now you try!” (Westover 105), just write and see where your mind can take you. 

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated tells the story of her growing up in the Idaho Mountains with her strictly religious, anti-government family and how she escaped her lifestyle in order to go to college and become educated. The textual analysis examines chapter fifteen “No More a Child”, in which Tara’s parents, mostly her father, ask her to pay rent, move out and threaten her. This exploration will provide a better understanding of how Tara’s father and mother play a role in her abuse, including emotionally, financially and physically.

Tara’s father is known throughout the book for making and changing his own rules; therefore, it is no surprise he asks Tara to pay a third of her savings to him for rent, after finding out she would use it for college. She is a minor, and consequently her parents have to provide for her, however Tara’s father notices Tara is saving her money and uses the rent as an excuse to make her unable to leave. To the financial abuse Tara responded with obedience; her father wants money, Tara gives him money. She had recently taken the ACT and is now waiting on the results. After another day working in the how junkyard, Tara goes back to the house to find her results; she had scored a twenty-two. She was excited, but when her father, who is strictly against public schools, found out, he lost his composure. He yelled, screamed, and proposed Tara should live on her own, and after discussing the proposal for surviving alone for a few minutes, her mother agreed and asked, “Do you think you can move out by Friday?” Like any sixteen year old, the thought of moving out filled Tara with fear, even panic. Tara describes how something in her broke that day, comparing that something to a dam or a levee. She would be unable to afford the cost of living, especially after recently giving her dad $400 for rent. Tara screamed back at her parents and ran into her room with tears in her eyes. Her mother comes into the room, trying to explain that it might seem unfair, but that she had already been living on her own and had been getting ready to marry Tara’s father at her age. Tara asks shocked, “You were married at sixteen?” to which her mother answered, “Don’t be silly…You are not sixteen….You’re at least twenty…. Aren’t you?” This scene represents how unaware Tara’s parents could be about their children. Parents have a strong impact on children’s mental health; wanting to throw their child out of the house for receiving a good ACT score and then not knowing their daughter’s age is a strong case of emotional abuse. Tara writes that her heart pounded heavily in her chest, indicating her helplessness. Tara tells her mother that she had just turned sixteen in September. As if it were nothing, her mother gets up, smiles, and tells Tara she could stay and explained how hard it is to keep track of her children’s ages. Tara writes about another type of abuse: physical. Following the paying rent, and moving out fiasco, Tara is working in the junkyard, when her father comes home with what he called “the Shear” but Tara describes as the most frightening machine she had ever seen. It did not even take longer than five minutes, before Tara’s brother Luke got his arm caught in it. Tara portrays Luke’s arm as “gashed to the bones”, meaning unfunctional. Tara’s father needed someone else to use the scrap machine, and Tara was his choice. She obeys, starts working with the blade, which is still covered with Luke’s blood, and prays. The prayers were not to avoid injury; Tara was praying for the injury to be like Luke’s. After some time, Shawn, the other brother, came around the corner, only to see Tara being slung through the air. Shawn immediately stops Tara from working with how he called it “the death machine”, and told their father that Tara will not continue working with this machine. Shawn and his father got into a physical fight, after which the father threatens once again, that if Tara does not do as he says, she could live on her own. Out of fear, Tara and Shawn worked the death machine, again submitting to their father’s will. Threatening your child is emotional abuse, but when you are threatening your daughter in order to make her work a deadly machine, it becomes physical abuse.

More and more abuses are brought to light in Tara Westover’s memoir Educated, and by analyzing chapter fifteen indicators to emotional, financial and physical abuse can be found. It is horrible to know that Tara had such bad, uncaring and even abusive parents, though it makes her achievements throughout the book even more remarkable. 

My sister was five when I was born, and from the beginning, little by little, I started to become a clone of her. On the other hand, my brother was eight, which meant he cared about me for approximately five years before he went into the scary and intensive stage called puberty.

Ever since I can remember my sister and I would always be by my father’s side going on adventures together, meanwhile my brother always stayed behind to read one book after another with my mother. 

One hot summer day, I was 3 at the time, my sister and I were at my grandparent’s house. I had been playing in their yard which offered a pool, countless beautiful flowers, and a pond surrounded by bamboo. The pond was my favorite thing about the yard due to the amount of animals swimming in it. I would sit there for hours watching them, trying to catch one or the other. When my sister found me sitting by the pond, she said: “Come on, I am going to teach you something”. 

I remember my grandparent’s house having two stories, with the first floor being the barn and the second floor being their actual living space, therefore Clara and I were walking up the outside staircase which brought us directly into the living room. My sister took me into the kitchen where my grandmother was cooking lunch. The kitchen was not big, so the only furniture in there was a small table with a white table dress and two chairs. It was my grandparents breakfast table where they would enjoy their coffee and read their newspaper in the mornings. 

“Clara wäsch da Emi d’Händ, dreckig kummt se ma ned in d’Küche”, said my grandmother to my sister. That basically means that if my sister does not clean me up, I am not allowed in the kitchen. Now clean, Clara, or “Clawy” how I would call her, sat me into one of the chairs by the breakfast table, pulled the other chair beside me, and took a seat. She grabbed a white pen and a block of post-its, “You have to learn how to write your name, before you start kindergarten in fall.” My little green eyes starred at her and I was thinking “Write? What do you mean write?”. Before I could say anything, she took the pen and started forming three letters, “E M I”. “See, Emi, that is how you do it, now try it!”, said Clara with her, also, green, eyes filled with excitement. I started trying to copy letter by letter and faster than you know, there it was, my name on paper, written by me. Soon after that day, I started giving it my own touch, so every time I would write my name I would draw as many horizontal lines on my E as the vertical line had space. 

My favorite family member is definitely my sister, not because of this story but because we have thousands of stories like this one. Clara will forever be my mentor, teacher and sister. Without her I would not be who I am.