Mother Tongue

Why did Tan's teachers encourage her to choose a career in math or science instead of writing? What caused them to miscalculate Tan's ability and potential in English? What point is Tan making with this story? How does this point fit in with the larger argument of "Mother Tongue"?

Tan's teachers encouraged her to choose a career in math or science instead of writing because she was foreign and her English was described as "broken." In the tests Tan was confused by the way they grouped things. The correct answer was simply judgement compared to math which was set to one answer. The Chinese are known to have majors in engineering, mainly because of this scenario. Tan may speak differently, but she understands language. She even stated how she thinks about it every day. She isn't an author; she is a story teller. What she sees is the images words create; her stories are broad, deep, and full of beauty. They're almost like pictures. This fits with the title "Mother Tongue" because to Tan the fact that her mother speaks different or "broken" doesn't matter to her, because she understands the language either way it's being spoken.

Digital Story Topic

The topic in which I'm chosing to tell my digital story is my first car. I'll show and talk about my experiences of the many adventures that my friends and I have lived through together, but not going too far in depth keeping it clean for our class movie session.

Relate how digital storytelling can ‘revolutionize’ the narrative experience. Relate to specifics from the reading.

Some writes are said to be "froze up like a deer in the headlights when it came time for them to construct an emotionally-compelling personal tale," says Lambert. He also states, "Only people who develop effective filtering, indexing, and reackaging tools in their minds can manage to successfully and consistently articulate meaning that reconstructs a coherent story." But most skilled professionals have difficulty using examples outside of their respective fields, from their personal life or non-professional experience, but those who do are often described as storytellers.

According to Lambert, when using the digital storytelling, images, videos, sounds, and other representations of events from our life can help us to reconstruct more complete memories and therefore expand the story. These are acheived through these three easy steps: owning your insights, owning your emotions, finding the moment, seeing your story, hearing your story, assembling your story, and sharing your story. Once you complete this process, your story is complete and 'revolutionized' with digital storytelling.