Spare Parts: RRJ1

1. Spare Parts starts out with the author, Joshua Davis, saying how he had first heard about
the team from an email received on November 1st of 2004, and that he had initially
thought that it was a spam email. However, Davis's mind was still stuck on that email a
month after he had deleted it, and he ended up calling the number provided, intrigued by
the story of "extraordinary success" (xi). The introduction opens at the competition itself
at the University of California, Santa Barbara on June 25 in 2004, where Tom Swean,
head of the Navy's Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems program, and Lisa Spence,
the flight lead of NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, are posing questions to the
individual members of the team that was the subject of the email Davis would receive in
November. The team came from Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix,
Arizona, and was composed of four members: Cristian Arcega, a "science ace" (3) who
lived in extreme poverty, Lorenzo Santillan, a past member of the WBP gang, Oscar
Vazquez, a successful Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps Cadet whose aspirations of
going into the military were cut short because of his fugitive status, and Luis Aranda, a
giant of a boy who rarely said much. As Swean and Spence asked each of them questions
about their robot, Stinky, the boys answered correctly in turn, impressing the judges.
2. When I was reading just the Author's Note, I got shivers, which came and went
throughout the assigned passage. I have a weak spot for underdog success stories because
of the optimism that comes with them. In a world where struggles are prevalent everyday,
I find it refreshing to hear about people who overcome the odds and become high
achievers. These kinds of stories tend to motivate me, instilling a desire to go past
barriers in my own life in order to reach goals I set for myself. All of the boys from Carl
Hayden High are undocumented like me, and I believe that as I read more of the story, I
will be able to connect with them and take more out of the book from that aspect.
3. Why would the press be more interested in covering fights and thugs rather than the
team's tremendous success with their robot? What would be the reasoning behind some
teams thinking that the Carl Hayden High team's presence was a mistake?
4. The reading is pretty smooth and easy to understand, even most of the scientific terms
used. However, while I was reading the first time around, the characters got mixed up
inside my head since there were so many of them introduced within a couple of pages.
So, I decided to go over the pages several times over, focusing on the characters' names
and connecting them with their descriptions.
5. garish- excessively bright or glaring, tastelessly color
I chose this word because I thought it paralleled the team in a way. Stinky was "garishly
painted", which meant that he basically stuck out like a sore thumb, the way the boys did
amongst the other veteran teams.
subsidized- paid in part by the government in order to give aid financially

I chose this word because it showed the reader the extent of the poverty in the area where
the boys came from, with the majority of the students at their school needing federal help in
order to eat.
de facto- to be generally accepted without formal agreements
I chose this word because it illustrates Oscar's character as a disciplined, sort of natural
leader whom the other boys look up to and trust.