Discussion with Someone Outside of Class for Chosen Essay from the Brief Sundance Reader

I had the discussion about Samuel Scudder’s piece, Take This Fish and Look at It, with my 25-year-old sister, Safoora. I’ve noticed that a lot of the works in our text is quite shortened, so I figured that our discussion would be brief. From the beginning of our discussion, though, we really hit the ground running and I was glad to know that we had similar thoughts about Scudder’s essay. I didn’t read the essay to her or paraphrase for her, rather, I let her read it for herself. Not knowing how to start, I began using the questions from our previous assignment. After she was done, I asked her what her initial thoughts were when she read the title and she stated that she took the title quite literally and surmised that someone would have been given a fish to take a look at. I laughed and asked her if she thought that the title was anything close to peculiar, and she said no. I told her my initial thoughts about how I thought it was such a random choice for a title, and stated the fact that I do love my awkward title choices and she laughed as well. I then went on to say that I thought theme that rolled with the essay was perception and how everyone sees things differently and that one has to look just a bit harder to see on a more detailed scale and asked her what she thought the main idea was. She said, “Um, that you have to look very closely at things and look very carefully.” I figured that that statement agreed enough with what I thought. I asked her the essay caught her attention in any way from the get-go, and she stated that she figured the essay wouldn’t be some climactic thrilling piece, but she did say that she enjoyed the essay and that it had a good flow from beginning to end, but she said that if she’d known what the essay was exactly about, she would not have read it. She went on to say that she did like Scuddle’s struggle with looking at the fish and that did make her want to finish it to find out if Samuel did or did not succeed. I remembered that I broke down Scudder’s work into different,