Read the excerpt from Pat Mora’s essay "The Leader in the Mirror." I hoped that most of the students were going to enroll in col
lege. The confetti would be for their private celebrations, those solitary moments when they had passed a test that worried them, finished a difficult paper at 2 A.M., found a summer internship. Sometimes, even when no one else is around, it’s important to celebrate when we have struggled and succeeded—to sprinkle a little confetti on our own heads. Now read the excerpt from the article "Career Planning for High Schoolers." About two-thirds of high school graduates from the class of 2013 enrolled in college that fall, according to BLS: 42 percent in baccalaureate (4-year) colleges and 24 percent in 2-year schools. Of the remaining one-third of 2013 graduates, who opted not to go to college, 74 percent entered the labor force. College-bound high school graduates may not know it, but BLS data show that wages are usually higher, and unemployment rates lower, for people who continue their education after high school. How are the two excerpts similar? Both discourage higher education. Both are written for immigrants. Both use numbers to prove a point. Both discuss higher education.
Both of the excerpts discuss higher education. The first one discusses the struggle of the high school students to persist in working hard even in the middle of the night to finish their school work and the second excerpt deals with facts and figures to explain the importance of going on to higher education after high school.
The Fall of the House of Usher is Poe's classical piece of this type. It presents terrifying atmosphere, the dark plot, and man's psychological terror to reveal the process of disintegration and annihilation of human mind, thus offering readers specific aesthetic perception through psychological shocks.
