Educated, Part Two

I understand and agree with the reasons that were brought up in our last discussion for not liking this memoir. However, I found part two of this book more interesting than part one because part two gave us something to root for: I was rooting for Tara to get good grades and earn enough money to attend school so she didn’t have to keep moving back home to face Shawn’s abuse. I was also rooting for Tara and Charles, even though they do come from completely different worlds.

Tara encounters the world of formal education and struggles to reconcile her Mormon beliefs (or the Mormon beliefs that her father forced upon her) in this new world. She struggles with her identity and doesn’t feel that she has a place where she belongs, even though Shawn and her father believe she belongs at home, working in the junkyard, helping the family.

This brings up the point: formal education vs religious education

Tara is well versed in what a Mormon should and shouldn’t do. Her formal education collides with her religious education. 

Formal education and Religion- overlaps and contradictions

• “That Saturday, I sat at my desk with a stack of homework. Everything had to be finished that day because I could not violate the Sabbath” (167).
• “I tried to write a personal essay for English, but I’d never written an essay before—except for the ones on sin and repentance, which no one had ever read—and I didn’t know how” (167).
• “My teacher said I had a knack for writing but that my language was oddly formal and stilted. I didn’t tell her that I’d learn to read and write by reading only the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and speeches by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young” (170).
• I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child” (172).
• “On the next exam I scored a B, and by the end of the semester I was pulling A’s. It was a miracle and I interpreted it as such. I continued to study until two or three A.M. each night, believing it was the price I had to pay to earn God’s support” (175).
• “From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God—books written by the Mormon prophets or the Founding Fathers—were not to be studied so much as cherished, like a thing perfect in itself” (247). 

Key points:

• Tara’s religious education has actually helped her with her formal education, even if she cannot see. Her religious education taught her how to read, and her religious education is where she wrote her first essay. 
• Her religious education also goes against her formal education. She was brought up learning that formal education is a bad thing and goes against the word of God.

Belonging

• “Next to me, Vanessa was scribbling steadily. Of course she was. She belonged here” (171).
• “‘Think you’re too good to scrap?’ His voice was raised. ‘This is your family. You belong here’” (177).
• “On Thursday, after I’d finished scrapping, I drove forty miles to the nearest Walmart and bought a pair of women’s jeans and two shirts, both blue” (180).
• “When other students asked where I was from, I said, I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth.”
• “This remembered world was somehow more vivid than the physical world I inhabited, and I phased between them” (234). 
• “ I never told him of my life before, never sketched for him the world that had invaded and obliterated the one he and I had shared. I could have explained. I could have said, “That place has a hold on me, which I may never break”” (235). 
• “Someone like me did not belong at Cambridge. It was as if the universe understood this and was trying to prevent the blasphemy of my going” (240). 
• “Breakfast the next morning was served in a great hall. It was like eating in a church, the ceiling was cavernous, and I felt under scrutiny, as if the hall knew I was there and I shouldn’t be” (243). 
• “I wanted the mind of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane” (245). 
• “To myself I pretended there were other reasons I couldn’t belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor, had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn’t belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore” (251). 

Key points

• Tara’s upbringing influences her ability to belong
• Tara struggles to find her place in college
• Tara keeps finding herself in places that she thinks she shouldn’t be, because “a person like her” does not  belong there, for example, at Cambridge. 

Identity

• …but the words belonged to my father, and even in my mind they sounded awkward, rehearsed. I was ashamed at my inability to take possession of them. I believed then—and part of me will always believe—that my father’s words out to be my own” (181).
• “Dad said I was becoming “uppity.” He didn’t like that I rushed home from the junkyard the moment work was finished, or that I removed every trace of grease before going out with Charles. He knew I’d rather be bagging groceries at Stokes than driving the loader in Blackfoot, the dusty town an hour north where Dad was building a miming barn. It bothered him, knowing I wanted to be in another place, dressed like someone else” (184).
• “On the site in Blackfoot, he dreamed up strange tasks for me to do, as he thought my doing them would remind me who I was” (184).
• “That was how Dad and Shawn became comrades, even if they only agreed on one thing: that my brush with education had made me uppity, and that what I needed was to be dragged through time. Fixed, anchored to a former version of myself” (185).
• “‘Who is this us?” Charles said. “You’re leaving tomorrow. You’re not one of them anymore’” (191).
• “[Shawn] is looking at me strangely, as if to say, This is who you are. You’ve been pretending that you’re someone else. Someone better. But you are just this” (202).
• “My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs” (205).
• “He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are”” (238) (advice from Dr Kerry). 
• “Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are” (250) (Dr. Kerry speaking to Tara at Cambridge). 
• “No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot” (251). 

Key points

• Tara’s family influences her identity
• Tara’s family wants her identity to solely be scrapping/working at the junkyard but Tara wants to expand her identity.

——-> Tara wants to “be a girl,” meaning, she tries to dress like a girl, look like a girl, wear makeup, etc.

• BYU is now also a part of her identity
• Dr Kerry recognizes Tara’s struggle to figure out who she is, and offers her advice. 

***Identity and belonging also overlap, especially in the section about Tara’s experience at Cambridge. She believes that she does not belong at Cambridge because of her identity, because of her upbringing, and because of her past experiences and lack of formal education. She fails to recognize that even though her past makes her who she is, that isn’t her identity entirely. Formal education is now a part of her identity, whether she knows it or not. 

Money

• “I needed money—Dad would have said I was broker than the Ten Commandments—so I went to get my old job back at Stokes” (176). 
• “I returned to BYU with only two thousand dollars. On my first night back, I wrote in my journal: I have so many bills I can’t imagine how I’m going to pay them” (209). 
• “I believe that hundred dollars was a sign from God. I was supposed to stay in school” (212).
• “I tore open the envelope and a check fell onto my bed. For four thousand dollars. I felt greedy, then afraid of my greed” (213). 
• “A thousand dollars. Extra. That I did not immediately need. It took weeks for me to come to terms with this fact, but as I did, I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money” (215). 
• “I hadn’t bought new clothes for Cambridge, because I’d had to take out a student loan just to pay the fees” (244). 
• “It would provide full funding for me to study at Cambridge, including tuition, room and board. As far as I was concerned it was comically out of reach for someone like me, but he insisted that it was not, so I applied” (252). 

Key Points

• Tara struggles to have enough money to return to school each semester
• She finds the money to pay for her formal education
• She does not want to accept monetary aid– or any help for that matter– from anyone. She sees it as a sign of weakness and she wants to exhibit strength. Eventually, she accepts a federal grant and takes out a student loan.