I thought the passage we read was a very personal record of his family and I am not really convinced that it can be related to a broader social spectrum of society as a whole. With each decade that passes social problems, status, and views change dramatically. You can see it as his family evolves into second and third generation Americans. I am sure Joe’s children if he decides to have any, will have a much better start than he did as a child just because he is now established in this country. They will probably exceed him in success just as he did his father because he now understands what it takes to make it in America, as in an education, a career, and an understanding of the culture. They will not really deal or even be exposed to the problems Joe saw with his family, with learning the language, finding jobs, or even interracial issues.
What they will be dealing with is the ever changing technology and how they want to incorporate that into their lives. Whether it is finding your wife on the internet as Joe did with Kass, or how much technology will affect the way they learn and work. The way technology evolves so quickly I think that it is inevitable and necessary that it does become part of the classroom. We should not assume that everyone has their own lab top however I believe it is fair to assume that every individual does have some type of access to the internet especially if they are going to school. And it has become vital to learn and be computer literate in our society because it is by no means going anywhere and will only become a bigger part of our everyday lives as society becomes more advanced. So to take technology out of the classroom because of economic assumptions would be a huge mistake.
Joe has another theme in his writing when he speaks of his father’s structural blindness and his own problems with placing his failures and successes on himself instead of his social and economic background. It raises some interesting questions about our nature versus nurture. Just as I had stated in the beginning his children are going to view the world very different from him because they had a more stable jumping off point from the very beginning.