March 26, 2018

On this day in class, we had the pleasure of listening to a great poem about Harlem. This poem was very eye-opening towards how people in Harlem live. From the outside looking in the topics mentioned in the poem are topics that we are not used to hearing about. The main topic of this poem was about a dream. The poet writes about this dream using multiple different word choices, mostly cacophony. He talks about this dream and all of the different possibilities. Most of them had to involve the dream either dying off or just withering away. At a first look one might think he may have just been talking about a regular dream but when we came together as a class we started discussing the dream the author talks about in the poem as the and seeing if he could be talking about the American dream. After Mr. Rivers telling us to think about it in this perspective, we broke back up into groups and discussed the argument the author was making. My group came up with two different claims, one against America and another against dreams. I will put my group's points below.

• Claim about Dreams: dream with ambitions are irrelevant in Harlem
• Group claim: ¨Although some would say that coming from a disadvantaged background can make a person strive for their dreams even harder, Langston Hughes argues that Harlem is a place where dreams and ambitions are irrelevant.¨