Glass Castle post 7

Alright...

Now, after leaving Las Vegas, the Walls came to a small mining town named Battle Mountain.
Jeannette's father got a job as an electrician in a mining company, and the Walls moved into a wooden building that had once been a railroad depot. And since the Walls doesn't have money for new furniture, they collect huge wooden spools and turn them into tables and the children have to sleep in a huge cardboard box. When their father were not home, Brian, Jeannette's brother, and Jeannette would go and explored the desert. After a few days, their parents decided to enroll them in a neighboring elementary school. Apparently, Jeannette's teacher didn't like students moving ahead of the class, and she disliked Jeannette because she wrote in binary numbers for all answers of her math assignment. The Walls kids started to have interaction with other kids in the neighborhood. Brian and Jeannette especially loved to find random things and did a lab trying to make them explode. One day, however, the stuff they picked up did not explode, then they decided, they were going to test whether of it was flammable the next day. Still, nothing happened, so they mixed up a batch of nuclear fuel and tossed a lightened match on it. A cone of flame shot up and knocked the Walls kids over. When they realized that one of the walls was on fire, and they ran out the house. Jeannette's father saw them and the burning house, instead of being furious, he was unusually calm.
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I think, in many ways, this part of the book reflect upon many things. Although this is an auto biography, bur perhaps because of her unorthodox experience, it actually connects to many problem in society today. For instance, poverty and education. Because of poverty, some school may not be able to provide the best education, hire the best teachers, and use the best textbooks. However, education is pretty much the factor that determines people's future these days. Many unfortunate people and their descendants have to stay in continuous poverty because they don;t have enough money to afford a house in the district with good education, and they don't have enough money to pay for college, which also mean that they won't have jobs with a high wage.
The reality is this brutal, if you are born in a family that suffers from poverty, you only have a mere chance to escape from such unfortune. Should we stop being optimistic and stop believing such idea as "everyone has a chance to success"? Or, should we still place everything upon such small chance and encourage people to never give up?