Personal Narrative Seed

Write about a time that home culture conflicted with school culture.

For Lubrano, this conflict had to do with the values of his working class home (conformity, money, loyalty to family) and the values of his middle-class schooling (questioning, self-fulfillment, knowledge for knowledge's sake). For Shen, it had to do with cultural ways of thinking founded in community and in rural life vs. cultural ways of thinking founded in individualism and in industrial life. For me, it was a conflict between my "hippie," anti-materialism parents and the kids at school who cared about designer clothes and having cars.

Think of a scene that puts these cultures into conflict. For me, it was in Jr. High when my Dad dropped off at a school dance in our old AMC Hornet (an embarrassing clunker of a car). I was wearing a yellow, big collared thrift store dress that my mom had picked out and that I felt pretty in until I walked into the gym and saw that everyone else was wearing Guess mini-skirts and twista-beads that matched their izods (and their socks).

Use all your senses to bring this scene alive in yoru reader's mind.

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