Wednesday's Homework

This is a link of regular and irregular plural nouns:

http://www.ezschool.com/playgame/Games:_English/Singular-Plural/Singular_To_Plural/Add_s%2C_es%2C_ies%2C_ves%2C_or_irregular%3F/Fill_in_the_Blanks/Set_3


Read here about Francisco Jiménez, author of Inside Out, and write me an
e-mail with your opinion.

Francisco Jiménez was born in 1943 in San Pedro, Tlaquepaque, Mexico, the second of two children in a family that would later number nine. Currently a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Santa Clara University, Jiménez is author of The Circuit and Breaking Through, notable fictionalized memoirs about migrant worker life as seen through the eyes of a boy.

Francisco was four years old when his family first migrated without papers to the San Joaquin Valley of California, hoping to leave behind forever their life of poverty. Instead of the good life they sought, the Jiménez family found years of backbreaking work as migrant workers -- living in tent camps, moving constantly to follow the harvest, and always trying to avoid "La Migra," the immigration authorities.

Young Francisco went to work in the fields at age six. Even though his schooling was sporadic because of the constant moves, he came to realize early that education would be his salvation. But the obstacles were formidable. In schools where only English was spoken, Jiménez remembers, "My first experience in school was very traumatic simply because I couldn't speak, and I couldn't communicate with the teacher, and I couldn't understand what she was saying... It scarred me for life." He failed the first grade, but Jiménez persisted, eventually becoming student body president of his high school and graduating with a 3.7 grade point average. Along the way there were many tough times, including the deportation of the entire family back to Mexico when they were finally discovered. A border patrol officer came to Jiménez's eighth-grade class and took him away. But the family was fortunate to find a way back, this time on a legal footing, when a Japanese sharecropper they had worked with agreed to sponsor them.

A literary epiphany came to Jiménez when he was a sophomore in high school. His English teacher thought he might like to read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, after she was struck by an autobiographical assignment he turned in. "For the first time I was able to relate my life to something I was reading," recalls Jiménez. "The story of my family as migrant workers was part of the American story, just like the Joad family."