Butterflies

Butterflies

  • Submitted By: mvsj101
  • Date Submitted: 08/15/2013 10:05 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 750
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 124

Sarah Johnson
Professor Te Punga Somerville
ENG 100
13 August 2013
Butterflies
Patricia Grace is a New Zealand writer of novels, short stories, and books for children. Grace is the most successful Maori writers in English. Her work has been acclaimed for its depiction of Maori culture in general as well as Maori diversity, and she helped give a voice to her culture and to reveal to the larger world what it means to be Maori. Grace has also written two novels and several children’s books. The format that Grace has used to write Butterflies is to show two different attitudes that conflict with each other.
The text is about two opposing sides, the granddaughter and the teacher concerning butterflies. The teacher who has the positive attitude about butterflies, praise them. Examples she gave the granddaughter was that they were beautiful. How they would fly in the sun, visiting all the pretty flowers. Then when they lay their eggs, they die. That people do not kill butterflies. However the granddaughter forms negative attitudes against these creatures. This is because she believes that they are harmful insects who ruin the crop of her grandfather, therefore they should be killed.
The granddaughter had shown the picture she drew and the caption she wrote. “I killed all the butterflies,” she read. “This is me and this is all the butterflies.” The grandmother asked her if the teacher liked her story, because it was indeed true. The granddaughter grew up with a negative belief of butterflies because of her upbringing since childhood with her grandparents who farm cabbages. The butterflies, for the farmers, are pests. It is very hard for the farmer to get rid of them. This is the reason why the granddaughter did not like them while the teacher praised them. The teacher did not know the granddaughter, about how she was raised to build negative thoughts against the butterflies.
The different points of view between the teacher and the granddaughter emerge due...

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