Douglass and Welty Frederick Douglass and Eudora Essay

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Douglass and Welty

Frederick Douglass and Eudora Welty came from two completely different environments. Douglass, a child of slaves, was abandoned when he was only six years old and discouraged to learn how to read. Throughout his life, he never forgot his feeling of abandonment. Welty had a happy childhood in a caring family that was passionate about books and reading. One of Welty's first memories was hearing her parents reading to each other from their favorite books. Despite these major differences in their upbringing, both Douglass and Welty used writing as a primary way of expressing their thoughts and ideas and became well-known authors in their own time as well as today, a century later.

It is difficult to understand how Frederick Douglass was motivated to became such an important author when reading his biography. His grandmother raised him until he was a very young child and then left him at his master's home in Maryland. She did not even tell him that this was going to happen. One can only imagine how alone he felt. Only two years later, he was sent to the city of Baltimore to become a houseboy with Hugh and Sophia Auld, relatives of his master. Once again he was living in a new environment with people he did not know. It must have been a very frightening time for him, although Douglass was fortunate that his mistress was a kind and tender-hearted woman. For the first time in his life, he was treated like a human being. The mistress even began to teach him the alphabet. Unfortunately, this did not last long. The mistress' husband told her that slaves could not be treated as equals. They cannot learn how to read. Not only did she stop teaching Douglass reading, but she even became angry when seeing him with a newspaper. Many children would have stopped learning. This was not the case with Douglass. The feelings of his master and mistress made him even more motivated to learn how to read, and he found any way he could to get lessons and worked very hard to learn and practice.

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He even tricked the ship carpenters to help him. As Douglass said about his learning at the ship-yard: "During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement, my pen and ink was a lump of chalk." His motivation was so great, he wrote on whatever he could find and with whatever tool that would write.

How different the motivation to learn was for Eudora Welty. From the moment she was born, Welty was surrounded by sisters and parents who loved to read. In fact, if Welty's house caught on fire, her mother would have worried more about saving the books than herself. This passion for reading motivated Welty throughout her childhood. Unlike Douglass, she was treated very well and praised for learning. She did not have to overcome low self-confidence and find the internal motivation to read. Instead, she was encouraged externally by all the people in her life. Everyone she knew shaped her attitude and aptitude toward learning. Her parents would have been very upset if she did not want to read, and they did everything possible to advance her interest. Welty called her desire to learn "clamorous" or "insistent." "From the first I was clamorous to learn -- I wanted to know and begged to be told not so much what, or how, or why, or where, as when. How soon." She already knew the alphabet by the age of five and was very excited to go to school.

Douglass did not have a formal training like Welty, with a specific curriculum for learning. Instead, he had to find very informal and unusual ways to learn his alphabet and how to read. His mistress started teaching him, but he only learned a little before she stopped. As a result, Douglass had to develop his own curriculum. His first, and most effective, approach to learning was from the boys in the….....

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