In the literacy narrative titled, Learning to Not Hate English by Austin Scaglione, a clear example is shown of a narrative being incorrectly placed within the category of a victim narrative. This narrative has the foundation of a student who feels that they were indeed victimized by his senior year English teacher. The student believes that they are a victim do to the lack of interest the pregnant teacher seemed to have, or in this case not have in their job. They feel that their teacher takes no interest in their class do to her pregnancy. In this narrative, the student describes each day that they were with this teacher, and of how they did not learn nor aspire to learn anything at all. “For the 42 minutes I was in that class, not a single thing was taught to me.”(Scaglione) The writer takes the lack of ability that their pregnant teacher has, as a direct attack on them self, which is quite an absurd claim to make. It is quite easy for someone to take a look at this narrative, and quantify it as indeed a victim narrative. Though if they are careful enough to look deeper within it, they will see that nothing about it allows it to be categorized into the victim narrative category. There is not any direct withholding of literacy taking place here, this qualifies as more of a passive barrier. Since the victim narrative is such a commonly used base, it is easy for this to slip by unnoticed by the reader. “The popularity of the victim narrative in student texts indicates that students associate school-based literacy practices with oppression and even cruelty.”(Alexander 618) Just because someone may have had a negative experience in school, doesn’t qualify them to use it in a victim narrative. As the text from Alexander mentions, the victim approach is simply very popular among narratives that revolve around students in school. Though this can be easily categorized as a type of literary cruelty towards the student, nothing about this narrative has a direct correlation or connection to these events and the writer having a newly minted hatred for reading and writing.

By thinning out the the commentary leading up to the description of the story, I am able to get the point across in a much more concise and effective manner. This allows me more freedom to add more later on. I added some more context on the comparison between the two quotes, which also allows myself to have a better structured paragraph.