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How does the way a person’s story is written and shared shape its impact?

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How does the way a person’s story is written and shared shape its impact?

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What can we learn through exploring the experiences of other people and their time period?

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What can we learn through exploring the experiences of other people and their time period?

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How does memoir shape our understanding of history? Of our world today?

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How does memoir shape our understanding of history? Of our world today?

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This article is an introduction to Tara Westover's childhood and her journey to where she is now. When describing her childhood, Westover says the word isolated because she didn't go to schools or friends houses because she stayed in the mountain with her family.

This idea of her isolated childhood is relevant to the book because it shows Westover's perspective on how she sees her childhood now that she is out of it. In the memoir, her childhood was still in the perspective of young Westover so now I can see Westover's point of view on it now.

Since Westover grew up isolated with her survivalist Mormon parents, the setting has to be more focused on her childhood rather than what is going on to the world at the time since it rarely affected her. But, reading this memoir helped shape my understanding of deeply religious people like Westover's father and why they think the way they do even though the rest of the world may not.

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ara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days in rural Idaho with radical survivalist Mormon parents. She didn't get a birth certificate until she was nine and had no medical records because her father did not believe in doctors. She and her six older siblings worked in her father's junkyard. As she grew older, her father's beliefs became more extreme and one of her brothers grew violent. At 17, she decided to educate herself as a means of escape. Within 10 years she had earned a PhD in intellectual history and political thought from Cambridge but was estranged from her parents and half of her siblings. Now 31 and still living in Cambridge, she has written a powerful memoir, Educated, about the transformative power of education and the price she had to pay for it.

Can you describe your childhood?
It was very isolated. Because I didn't go to school I didn't have friends in the way other people do. The only people I knew were the children of families like ours, who were home-schooled, anti-doctor, and we didn't see them that often. I think I was 13 when I first went to another child's house who went to school. I didn't ask her back because she teased me about not knowing what a fraction was.

Do you have any warm memories from growing up?
I have a lot, actually. The mountain where we lived was a beautiful place and the scrapyard was fun in many ways; it was exotic. My mother was a midwife and a herbalist so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures. I also have a lot of good memories of breaking horses with my brother Shawn before he became violent. There was a dramatic moment when I was on a runaway horse and he actually saved my life heroically.

As you grew older Shawn began to bully and abuse you. He pulled you around by your hair, broke your wrist, flushed your head in the toilet, killed the family dog and threatened to kill you, too. How did this begin?
When I was 15 and he found me smudging my eyes with my sister's mascara. He couldn't stand seeing me grow up to be a woman. He regularly called me a whore and a slut. Whenever he hurt me he was always really apologetic afterwards. He tried to say it was just a game that he hadn't meant to harm me, and it was always my brother's version of events rather than mine that I wrote down in my journals. I made myself believe it was true.

How could your parents have turned a blind eye to what was going on?
That's the biggest question of my life. I was reluctant to speak to my parents about it for a long time because I didn't want to acknowledge the unthinkable - that they already knew but had done nothing about it.

Was that what finally led to the rift between you and your family?
Yes. What broke us was not me going to college against my father's will or even leaving home to go to Cambridge. It was me speaking openly about my brother Shawn being violent and abusive to me. My parents couldn't deal with that so they turned the other way and made me look like the bad person. In families like mine there is no crime worse than telling the truth.

Can you see yourself becoming reconciled with them?
I will always hope that we might be reconciled, and I hope for the sake of my brother's wife and family that he's mellowed and changed. But while I'll always watch for signs that the family culture has shifted away from secrets and enabling, I don't wait for them.

Do you miss your family?
I miss them every day, but I can also feel comfortable with my decision not to have them in my life.

Would you recommend going to college or university with no prior experience of school?
No! Not at all. I felt like the only dancer on stage who had missed rehearsal. And I made some excruciating missteps, like the time I was in a European history lecture and I asked what the Holocaust was. No one believed I didn't know. They all thought I was some kind of racist. But then again, after years of knowing virtually nothing at all I found learning so exciting. I piled up books and read late into the night. Sometimes I barely slept.

How do you feel about this very personal book being published?
I am already in pre-emptive therapy with a brand new therapist. You probably think I'm joking but I'm not. I told him, "I'm fine right now but in two weeks when this book comes out I might be freaking out."

You say "brand new" - have you been in therapy before?
I had a mental breakdown while doing my PhD at Cambridge, soon after I cut off contact with my parents, and I started seeing the university counsellor, one of the best decisions I ever made. There's something very nourishing in setting aside an hour a week to talk. The act of admitting that I needed something I couldn't provide for myself was immensely helpful.

You write with the flair of a novelist. How did you learn that?
Everything I wrote at the beginning was awful. Then I became obsessed with the New Yorker fiction podcast.You can hear these wonderful things like Margaret Atwood reading a Mavis Gallant story and then she and Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker fiction editor, will discuss why it works. They'll bring up all these weird little things that writers do that make it much easier to say - "Yeah, I can do that too".

How do you feel about Mormonism?
I feel very grateful to the church and to [the Mormon] Brigham Young University, where I first went to college, but I can't reconcile myself to the church's teachings on women, like women not being allowed to be church leaders and polygamy in the afterlife . I tried to be a Mormon feminist but that was exhausting.

What do you do just for the hell of it?
I have very non-eccentric hobbies. I like to read, to have dinner with friends and junk out on TV like everybody else. I love to walk my dog, who is a little white monstrosity. In Idaho they'd call him a fake dog.

What next? Back to academia?
I think I might try some more writing. It was so hard learning how to do it properly it seems a waste of all that effort not to do more of it.

Educated by Tara Westover is published by Hutchinson (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99

This article was updated on 18 February to correct some errors, including about Mormonism and plural marriage.

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Tara Westover: 'In families like mine there is no crime worse than telling the truth.'

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ara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days in rural Idaho with radical survivalist Mormon parents. She didn't get a birth certificate until she was nine and had no medical records because her father did not believe in doctors. She and her six older siblings worked in her father's junkyard.

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This article talks about the need for every student and child to get a quality education. Based on many different polls and surveys, the article points out how those with education are more likely to earn more money and participate in voting, volunteering, and charity. But, an important perspective that this article gives is for the students who have been historically at a disadvantage because of the color of their skin. The article talks about needing to incorporate a strategy that will benefit the nonwhite students and create more opportunities for them.

This article connects back to the book Educated because it talks about education being important because it provides children with the skills and knowledge to be able to succeed in life. They are provided with life skills that lead to self-discovery that Westover talked a lot about in her book. She learned lessons about perseverance when she reread books to understand it.

By learning about Westover's journey to get an education and how she learned more about herself when she got an education, we learned about the importance of education and why every child should get one. Education isn't something that you only learn equations and formulas from, it is something where you learn skills and qualities that you will use for the rest of your life which is something that Westover shared in the book. By learning about her experience with education, it pushes others to want that same experience. But, education cannot easily be obtained by everyone, and by Westover sharing her story with education, causes people to want the same for every child.

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This poem tells the story of the experience children have in school. School is not only a place to learn about new things and travel the world in books. But, also, to learn about the human nature and how much a person can grow in school in their thinking and emotion.

This poem matters because it points out that education gives people not only knowledge about the world and other subjects, but it also helps them grow as a person. Being educated can help you expand the scope of your mind and how you think, which will help you develop as a person. You can gain values and look at different perspectives with education. Which, relating to the book, Tara didn't get when she wasn't educated, she only saw the perspective of her father and her family.

The way that this poem was written shapes its impact even more because it shows just a normal day in the classroom in Mrs Tilscher's class. Since it is written this way, it shows the importance of everyday education and going to school.

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You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweet shop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she'd left a good gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone's nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared
at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,
as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

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In Mrs Tilscher's Class by Carol Ann Duffy - Scottish Poetry Library

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You could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger, tracing the route while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery. Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.

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This piece of art shows the importance of education and how it will lead to success throughout your life. It shows the importance of education because it creates better opportunities in your life through jobs.

This art piece is important for the book because the book follow Tara's journey with education. It can be represented in how the people in the piece had to climb the "mountain" of books to get to the top of jobs. She had to learn about different subjects like algebra and the Holocaust to later become a memoirist. In the end, they find who they are with education and who they want to be (what they want to work as for the rest of their life).

We learned through Tara's experience of self-discovery through education. She learned important life-skills in education like the patience to read things she didn't understand when she read the Book of Mormon. While she was learning she was also finding her passions and learned new things about the world she wouldn't have learned without going to school.

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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was passed during the Obama presidency and it shows a "commitment to equal opportunity for all students". The act helps disadvantaged students who might have not gotten equal opportunities for education and it helps create positive change in even the most low-performing schools.

This act relates to the book because it is rooted in the idea that in order to have a successful career, kids need to be properly educated to do so. This act also takes into consideration those who have a disadvantage in getting a good opportunity like Westover did.

Westover's memoir helped shape our understanding of the world today because she shined light on why education needs to be valued for not only what we learn at schools, but the self-discovery that happens in schools. She showed how education can help you succeed later in life when she went to college and later became a memoirist when she wrote this book. One of the reforms that this act provides is that "all students in America be taught to high academic standards that will prepare them to succeed in college and careers". The act reflects Westover's idea of the book that school helps prepare you for life and success in the future.

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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed by President Obama on December 10, 2015, and represents good news for our nation's schools. This bipartisan measure reauthorizes the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the nation's national education law and longstanding commitment to equal opportunity for all students.

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In this interview with Bill Gates, Westover talked about her relationship with school and education while growing up and when she was in college. She talked about the polarity between the uneducated and the educated and how they may not be able to see the other sides reasoning for thinking and doing things the way they do. She

Knowing about how Westover thinks about education on a more deeper level is important to the book because it gives a sense of what she thinks now compared to what she thought before when she was a child. I think that knowing Westover's childhood from her memoir makes this interview even more important to show her change in thinking and shows her passions on education.

The way that Westover talked about education in her memoir and in this interview was a lot about self-discovery through education. I think that the way she wrote the book is very powerful because it creates a new perspective on education rather than just education being important for your career but also for yourself.

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A conversation with Bill Gates and Tara Westover