"For Julia, In Deep Water" Response: 12 June 2014

Sentence 1: Observation
In John Morris' poem, "For Julia, In Deep Water," Morris utilizes passive construction to describe the actions of the parents.

Sentence 2: Contextualize
At the beginning and the at the end of the poem, the parents, in particular the father, stand helpless as they watch their daughter struggle with learning under the "encouraging arms" of the instructor (Morris, 6).

Sentence 3: Textual Evidence
For example, the first line of the poem: "the instructor we hire" in active construction would read 'we hire the instructor, and the second stanza, line 16, reinforces the passive nature of the parents when Morris states, the mother "is doing nothing."

Sentence 4-6: Discuss and Analyze
In both of these examples, the parents, unlike the instructor, stand frozen as their young daughter learns to swim. However, perhaps only through their passivity can Julia learn anything. Although Julia's swimming lesson acts as the narrative of the poem, perhaps the parents in the poem are actively engaged in a learning process as much as Julia, the process of letting a child become an adult.

Sentence 7: Conclude
As most parents would agree, their children will always be their babies, but perhaps the most challenging part of parenting is letting go and allowing children to become independent, individual adults.      

*When you write your post, you do not have to separate it into sentences like I have done. Yours will be in paragraph form. This is just to model how I wrote this post. You may want to do this at first, then take the headings out when you are ready to publish.