Ingrid Illustrated

  As a dancer, I often feel weightless, like I can fly, like I can do anything, which is why dancers are so captivating on stage. Especially when I’m turning, I feel this aliveness and adrenaline through my body. It is a magical feeling that I would want everyone in the audience to experience as well, which is why I’m going to illustrate with three simple steps, how to do a simple pirouette turn.  Prep and plié   To begin, plant your feet in a parallel fourth position. To get to fourth position, you can think of putting your feet right next to each other so they are parallel and touching, and then stepping one foot about a foot in front of the other (for a right turn step your left foot in front and for a left turn step your right foot in front). Now that you’re in a parallel fourth position, bend your knees so that your back knee is almost touching the floor and extend your arm on the same side as your back leg to the front (parallel to the ground) and the arm on th...

  My identity as an Asian female has made it pretty difficult for me to find books with characters I can relate to. Especially in our curriculum, I don’t believe we have read any books this year with an Asian-girl character, let alone MAIN character. Even outside of school, I haven’t read many books with characters that would look like me because there simply aren’t many. Because of this, I haven’t enjoyed the books in our curriculum as much as others with a different reader identity have, which is ok, but also a problem that needs to be continuously worked on. I don’t feel represented or understood by most of the texts we read, which is a problem Cofer directly addressed in her short story.  She talked a lot about how she was stereotyped everyday and how that made her extremely uncomfortable. She also mentioned how it felt like she couldn’t connect with other people, even her audience, which is how I feel sometimes. In many books Asians are part of, they are the funny, foreig...