What I'Ve Learned from American Literature

American Literature
Janae’ Oliver
Everest University Online
AML2000-12

Experiencing and learning more about American Literature this term was very informal. It helped me better recognize the significance of life history despite who a person is or where they came from. This course caused me to evaluate my past life lectures and practices. In every story or short story we were assigned to read there was a part I could relate to, or something significant that reminded me of a previous event I experienced throughout my life. I connected to the stories from similar earlier period experiences. The stories were very detailed, imaginable and filled with knowledge and experience. Each time I read one I could picture myself being there. American literature has bought out both positive and negative life practices to my mind and it was good to reflect about then and say to myself, “Look how far I’ve come”.
The story I could connect to the most was “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker. While reading this story I notion the author was describing so many similar things of my family. My aunt was just like Dee. She didn’t comprehend the significance of the heritage. She too wanted to alter her name for an African name. Growing up together, we would spend majority of our summers, Easter and the other holidays in the Bahamas with our extended family. It educated all of us the meaning and significance of our past and about the seventy year old straw hat my great-grandmother kept from age group to age group. This story had an immense force on me because I am incredibly family orientated and my family past represents everything in me. I make sure my daughter appreciates the significance of her past in addition to mine.
If I were a character I would be a character in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. When I was young I was awfully intelligent in school however, I didn’t make many wise decisions. I used to get into a lot of trouble with the people I to chose be around. I could remember preparing to start high school and my mother sat with me and gave me a similar talk that relates to “The Road Not Taken”. My mother clarified to me that it was time to take life more serious and grow up. My mother said to me, “What you do in high school will have an effect on the rest of your life. High school is where you make major choices on where you want to be in life six years after finishing high school. Therefore, as we make choices in life, we should feel confident about whatever path we choose to lead and that will be our ultimate decision. Whichever path we choose to go down we shouldn’t have to look back later on in life saying what we could have, should have and would have done. I take pride in most things in the path I chose to take. So far I am greatly flourishing in my path and I’m slowly but surely finishing off my path by earning my criminal justice degree and maintaining the educational part of my life and keeping education in my family active.
In conclusion, American Literature provides a lot of useful history and information for a student. It educates us on how to properly write poems, short or long stories and the ability to recognize the dissimilarities among them all. Any student can develop into a professional in writing poems and short or long stories. American Literature also educates us on how to understand the importance of what we are reading and comprehend what we have read. American Literature permits us to make out most of our own past life familiarities in the various stories.