This week’s assignments, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Walt Whitman’s “One’s-Self I Sing” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” all had a common theme of the individual person. Each reading talked about how a person is unique and how we are created this way. In my experiences at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, I see how each child I help is unique in their own way. I see that they each struggle with writing, and that is why I’m there to help. However, through teaching them, I have found how different each child’s is. This has made my experience at the high school great because I have been able to see how unique each child is in their own way.

In “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman describes the body in great detail. He discusses how unique and individual the body is to each person. The uniqueness that we are created with is our soul and it represents who we are at our innermost point. It is what defines me as me and you as you. In Whitman’s “One’s Self I Sing,” it in a way further develops the ideas present in his first poem. He explains even further the idea that mankind is very complex and unique. Whitman uses lines 7-8 to describe how our influence in the world around us stems from our free will given to us from God. I also noticed that structurally, each line in the poem is a different length. This illuminates the idea that each person in the world is unique.

The children who I teach always have been kind to me. They respect that I am there to help them out and in this way we have a good relationship. The uniqueness that Whitman talks about I see through their writing each time I sit down to help them with a paper. Each student is different and their writing is clearly representative in this. Yazmine, who originally immigrated to the Unites States from the Dominican Republic during her freshman year, always has a strong Spanish influence in her writing. She will always throw in some words from her native language in order to spice up whatever piece of writing she is working on. Malika seems to be more casual in her writing and use terms that we would consider to be “bad English.” However, she doesn’t know any better and therefore sticks to what she knows.

In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, she shows the readers that playing God is a bad idea. In the novel Victor Frankenstein creates a monster by stitching the pieces of other humans together along with finding the “secret of life.” After he becomes God-like and creates this monster, it comes to life and wreaks havoc on everyone. It eventually ends up killing everyone close to him and made his life miserable. Overcoming his past mistakes seems to be the main conflict in the novel. He cannot undo the past and even though he wishes that he never made the monster, it now lives and seeks revenge for Frankenstein’s actions.

Many people must overcome their past in life. It can be central to moving on in life. Like the children that I teach, they must also overcome their past and move on from the obstacles that once stopped them from reaching their potential. Their past was filled with bad public education and these children, who needed help, were pushed aside and never dealt with. Now they have new opportunities to grow and develop as students. They world is their oyster and now they have a way to escape their past and move on; something which Frankenstein could never do. I enjoy being a part of this and it makes me happy to know that I am making a difference in these children’s lives.