Olen Bruce, Ph.D.
eNotes Educator
Achievements
16
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4315
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395
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About
I am a high school teacher and have worked as a tutor for students in grades 3 through college. My particular interest is American history, and I enjoy reading current history books on subjects related to World War II, Civil Rights, the Kennedy era, women's rights, and other topics. History is a fascinating topic, and I hope to help students enjoy learning it. I've also worked with students on writing and understanding literature. I hope my explanations and answers make students' work more enjoyable.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in Me Talk Pretty One Day
To summarize this story in four sentences, you must be very succinct and mention only the essential details of the story. Essentially, David Sedaris is writing about his experiences learning French... -
Answered a Question in Thomas Jefferson's Presidency
The election of 1800 was the first election that pitted opposing parties against each other, and it was rancorous in nature. In this election, the incumbent, John Adams, who was a Federalist, ran... -
Answered a Question in US History (General)
President Lyndon Johnson launched a War on Poverty in the mid-1960s to tackle the crushing poverty that affected many Americans, especially including many African American communities. His... -
Answered a Question in History
The Declaration of Independence declares that there are certain "unalienable rights," which include "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These are rights that cannot be taken away and... -
Answered a Question in Hamlet
In act 1, scene 5, of Hamlet, the Ghost's speech features alliteration, which refers to starting words that are close to each other with the same sound. The Ghost says he is doomed "to fast in... -
Answered a Question in History
The period following Reconstruction until the 1920s was a time of economic instability. Business owners feared the ups and downs of capitalism, and, to prevent these kinds of economic shocks, they... -
Answered a Question in History
As Erik Larson explains in Devil in the White City, the World's Columbian Exposition marked a change in American culture. It was a time of great urbanization, and parts of Chicago were being... -
Answered a Question in The Market Revolution, Industrialization, and New Technologies
In the early years of the Republic, Alexander Hamilton supported the first wave of American industrialization by imposing a high tariff on foreign goods. This tariff was intended to protect... -
Answered a Question in Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow
Sophie Scholl began to question the tenets of National Socialism, the doctrines followed by the Nazis. She did not believe their ideas about race, religion, and discrimination, and she went on to... -
Answered a Question in Fences
The conflict that drives all the other conflicts in the play is Troy's battle with death. This could form a potential thesis for your argumentative essay. At the beginning of the play, Troy is... -
Answered a Question in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
One of the conflicts in this book is whether Junior should stay on his reservation or seek a better education in Reardan. By leaving his reservation to attend the nearby white school, which has... -
Answered a Question in King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
Remnick mentions this quote on page xiii of the Prologue of his book. By speaking these words, Ali meant that his professional boxing career was not simply a way to make money or gain fame. It was... -
Answered a Question in Kaffir Boy
Mathabane does not want to go to school in part because he has been exposed to the wild boys running in the streets. They teach him that it is far better to scrounge for money, food, and other... -
Answered a Question in Macbeth
In act 1, scene 3, Macbeth hears from the three witches that he will become thane of Cawdor and later king of Scotland. Banquo hears at the same time that he will be an ancestor of kings. Banquo... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
In book 1, Telemachus is described as a "boy daydreaming" (line 145) while he sits among the suitors vying for his mother's hand. He is dreaming about his father's return as Athena first arrives.... -
Answered a Question in The Columbian Exchange
The Columbian Exchange was the interchange of ideas, raw materials, and cultures between the Old and New Worlds following the arrival of large numbers of Europeans in the New World in the... -
Answered a Question in The Outsiders
Ponyboy, the protagonist of the story, has several problems. He argues with his older brother, Darry, in part because Darry is responsible for raising him and his middle brother, Sodapop, after the... -
Answered a Question in Night
Elie makes this observation as Jews are being deported, and his family has settled into the ghetto where the deported had been living. Promptly, the Jews who are new to the ghetto have forgotten... -
Answered a Question in The Blind Side
In the movie version of The Blind Side, Leigh Anne Tuohy attends a volleyball game in which her 16-year-old daughter, Collins, is playing at Wingate Christian School. Leigh Ann is there with her... -
Answered a Question in Sonny's Blues
The elements you choose are somewhat subjective. I would say that conflict plays an important role in this story, as the narrator struggles to understand why his brother, Sonny, has been arrested... -
Answered a Question in Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement
This question has no one right answer, but one of the many reasons that the Civil Rights movement was effective is that Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers practiced non-violence. Even when... -
Answered a Question in Hidden Figures
Mary Jackson was the first African American woman to work as an engineer at NASA. As explained in the book Hidden Figures, Jackson attended the Hampton Institute for college, as had her mother and... -
Answered a Question in The First Great Awakening
The Great Awakening was in many ways a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment stressed reason and rationality over emotion, and it was an attempt to replace superstition with... -
Answered a Question in Maus
The first part of Maus details the beginnings of Vladek's relationship with his first wife (and Art's mother), Anja. When they meet, Vladek is impressed with Anja's sensitivity and intelligence.... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
Parallelism is a type of literary device in which two or more clauses or sentences that are next to each other have the same grammatical structure.The use of parallelism creates a kind of rhythm... -
Answered a Question in The Cay
Over the course of the story, Philip learns to be more open-minded. His mother teaches him to be prejudiced toward black people, but when he is on an island with a black man named Timothy, he... -
Answered a Question in History
Americans have increasingly come to know about the atrocities committed by Europeans, mainly Belgians, in the Congo during this time period. However, the atrocities that were carried out in the... -
Answered a Question in Karl Marx
Marx's point is that philosophy has not been used to practical ends. Though philosophers produce abstract ideas about the world, people do not adapt these abstractions into making practical changes... -
Answered a Question in The Cop and the Anthem
"The Cop and the Anthem" contains situational irony. This is the type of irony in which the opposite of what the reader thinks will happen actually does happen. For example, when Soapy is carrying... -
Answered a Question in History
In this relatively short book of history, Wood attempts to explain the causes of the American Revolution, its character, and its consequences (xxv). In the first part of the book, Wood explains... -
Answered a Question in The Women's Rights Movement
The second-wave feminist movement developed in the mid to late 1960s. Its goal was to provide women with equality in pay and educational and career opportunities and to change the broader social... -
Answered a Question in The Significance of the Frontier in American History
The Western frontier provided a safety valve to prevent forms of class conflict among white people who were not able to succeed economically. People who were not thriving economically in the East... -
Answered a Question in The Best of Sherlock Holmes
In the story "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," Holmes is summoned to examine a case involving the second wife of a man named Ferguson. This wife, who is from Peru, has beaten Ferguson's son,... -
Answered a Question in History
One way in which American freedoms were limited in the 1890s was the curtailment of American Indians' rights. In 1890, the 7th Cavalry killed many Indian women, men, and children from the Sioux... -
Answered a Question in Religion in the Thirteen Colonies
The Puritans thought that sin was a result of the Original Sin, or the fall of Adam and Eve from God's grace in the Garden of Eden. They thought that, as a result of this sin, humans were sinful... -
Answered a Question in Barn Burning
Abner's use of the phrase "blood ties" has many layers of meaning. Abner tells his son, Sarty, that he should not have been tempted to tell the Justice of the Peace that he had seen his father... -
Answered a Question in How I Met My Husband
Mrs. Peebles and Loretta Bird advance the plot of the story because they provide an alternative narrative that makes Edie's innocence very clear. For example, when they question Edie about whether... -
Answered a Question in Angela's Ashes
Both the book Angela's Ashes and the movie Lost in Translation are stories about the strength of the human spirit and about the ways people can find hope and faith even in the face of loss and... -
Answered a Question in Essays
The thesis statement for this essay should contain your argument comparing local and imported food. For example, are you claiming that local food is superior to imported food (or the opposite—that... -
Answered a Question in American History
In America's southern colonies, people were divided by class, race, and freedom. In 1619, the first enslaved people arrived in Virginia. There was also a division between whites, as some were... -
Answered a Question in To Da-duh in Memoriam
Neither the child nor Da-duh "won" their battle of the wills. Throughout the story, they fight over which is superior—Da-duh's island of Barbados or the child's home in New York. In the end, the... -
Answered a Question in Sigmund Freud
In his book Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, Freud argued that young children of approximately ages 3 to 5 have the unconscious urge to kill the parent of the same gender and to become... -
Answered a Question in Romanticism
Classicism, or Neo-Classism, was in many ways a revolt against the excesses of the Baroque period. Classism, which was both an artistic and intellectual movement during the 1700s, emphasized a... -
Answered a Question in Asian History
Japan began to become more imperialist after it modernized in the mid- to late-1800s. The history of modern Japan begins in 1853, when the American naval commander Matthew Perry arrived in Japan... -
Answered a Question in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Personification involves making non-living things seem capable of having emotions and taking actions. Here are two examples of personification in How the García Girls Lost their Accents. One... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
Jordan Baker, a character in The Great Gatsby, is the epitome of the "New Woman" of the 1920s. The freer, more modern image of women of this time period was often called a "flapper." Jordan is a... -
Answered a Question in Kim
The moral of the novel Kim is that one should be loyal to his or her country. Kim, the protagonist, is raised in Lahore, India, but he is the son of Irish parents. His father, now dead, was a... -
Answered a Question in An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum
In the first stanza of this poem by Spender, the poet creates images that compare the children in the classroom to weeds and paper. He says that the children are like "rootless weeds," and have... -
Answered a Question in Small Island
Hortense, who has arrived in London from Jamaica, speaks in a way that is more proper and strained than the way other characters speak. Through her choice of words, she is trying to impress others... -
Answered a Question in Life of Pi
Life of Pi is about the persistence of faith against all odds. Pi survives a shipwreck in the company of a tiger named Richard Parker, though no one believes this story afterward. Instead, Pi is...
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