Some Lessons From The Assembly Line

When writing it’s important to connect with the topic; therefore, I read each article before making my decision. “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan was the article suggested by the Reading Selection Quiz, I could not connect with this article at all. I found “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris uninteresting. Some Lessons From the Assembly Line” by Andrew Braaksma was intriguing and hit really close to home, so I decided it would be best for my critical analysis project.
The author's purpose for writing "Some Lessons From the Assembly Line" is to explain the importance of higher education. Careers that don’t require an individual to have any form of higher education, such as the factory mentioned in this article, do not offer stability or the greatest pay rates. The key points in paragraphs four through six lead me to my decision.
The following key points support the author's purpose because; with a higher education, an individual can open a variety of career opportunities with stability, reasonable shifts, and better pay rates.
First off, in paragraph four, “After a particularly exhausting string of 12-hour days at a plastics factory, I was shocked at how small my check seemed” (Braaksma, 2005). Secondly, in paragraph five, “As frustrating as the work can be, the most stressful thing about blue-collar life is knowing your job could disappear overnight” (Braaksma, 2005). Lastly, in paragraph six, “Factory life has shown me what my future might have been like had I never gone to college in the first place” (Braaksma,
2005).
For this specific article, I believe the author is addressing anyone who has not received a college degree. By using his own experiences, he can encourage others to get an education and create a better life for themselves. However, some things he admits will challenge his purpose. “For a student like me who considers any class before noon to be uncivilized, getting to a factory by 6 o’clock each morning, where rows of hulking, spark-shattering machines have replaced the lush campus and cavernous lecture halls of college life, is torture” (Braaksma, 2005). This sounds lazy! If someone decides to further their education they need to be prepared to work hard and get up as early as necessary. “When I’m back at the university, skipping classes and turning in lazy re-writes seems like a cop-out after seeing what I would be doing without school” (Braaksma, 2005). He admits to taking advantage of his education.
Being a single mother, and a young woman living in a small town, I can relate to the importance of higher education. Where I live, the town is made up mostly of blue-collar careers. In the last couple of years; there have been two major setbacks for the town of Erwin, TN. In 2015, CSX laid off over 250 employees. In 2016, Morrill Motors laid- off over 100 employees. I have watched some of the families suffer from this. I have seen how hard it is to keep a blue-collar career. These families depended on those careers for years, only to lose their jobs in the end. I don’t want to go my entire life worrying if I’ll have a job tomorrow.