Expectations Drive Perceptions By Annie Dillard

Education means something different for everyone. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (33). The truth to this is that education affects us in every aspect of our lives. Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. In Rose’s exploration of the purpose of school, he also reflects on his personal experiences and how those experiences gave him tools that are applicable for his daily life. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, emphasizing how those experiences become crucial to one’s personal growth and potential.

As both the standards of school work and stress levels of student’s rise, the American school system remains unaltered, unchanged, and unaffected for over a hundred years. School is an institution that can serve as a massive gate in life granting you access to a job, stability, and a future or it can become a giant pillar in the way of everything you wish to achieve. While we recognize that a student’s own motivation, study habits, and will to learn, are cardinal in any schooling system, we must also understand the issues with an institution that is fundamentally unsound from the ground up. In today’s world, students are shoved with the hands of docility, and amenability as they render themselves in a system that has inadvertently failed them, by neglecting to celebrate their differences, and varying learning patterns. Conformity in the education system has shown to damage the personalization and

In the story “I Just Wanna Be Average” the author Mike Rose argues that society very often neglects and doesn’t see the full value and potential of students.

Education means something different for everyone. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (33). The truth to this is that education affects us in every aspect of our lives. Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. In Rose’s exploration of the purpose of school, he also reflects on his personal experiences and how those experiences gave him tools that are applicable to his daily life. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, emphasizing how those experiences become crucial to one’s personal growth and potential.

Many are quick to disregard education’s role outside of the classroom. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (Rose 33). Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. By reflecting on his personal experiences and how those gave him the tools applicable to his daily life, he emphasizes why education should never be overlooked. Rose’s use of referencing relatable experiences in a logical manner makes his argument persuasive to the readers and he succeeds in making the readers reconsider why education matters to them. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us effectively persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, which proves true in our everyday lives because the essential aspect of education is what we do with it and how it helps develop one’s personal growth.

Education and school. Some of you are now grimacing at the prospect of being trapped inside a classroom. Others are now thinking what I wouldn’t do to be able to go back and start all over again. Now don’t worry, I’m not going to convince you that you should love school. My job isn’t to change your perspective on school like a politician would do.

As students were forced into their growth of knowledge in elementary school and middle school by continuously being taught basics, in order to prepare them for high school and beyond, they get to gain their freedom and decide whether or not they want to meet their teachers’ marks in high school. Throughout the school year, there comes a time where students have to sign up for classes. By having this choice, students can decide on how they want to challenge themselves in the next school year. During my two and a half years of high school that I have conquered so far, I learned that in a classroom setting there are students who take advanced courses, enjoy the subjects that they chose to take, and try their best to get the best grades that they can receive, in order to prepare them for their future in adulthood. However, there are also students who do not try or realize the importance of the free education given to them because they do not have an interest in the subjects that teachers are teaching them or are just being forced by their students to attend school. Some teachers try their best to bring out the motivation in these students who do not yet see that education is power and freedom, but there are also teachers who ignore these helpless students that are blinded by the present things that affect them like popularity or living with the motto that “you only live once”, because these teachers do not have the inspiration in the

Many are quick to disregard education’s role outside of the classroom. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (Rose 33). Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. By reflecting on his personal experiences and how those gave him the tools applicable to his daily life, he emphasizes why education should never be overlooked. Rose’s referencing relatable experiences in a logical manner makes his argument persuasive to the readers and he succeeds in making the readers reconsider why education matters to them. In his book Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike Rose effectively persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, emphasizing how those experiences become crucial to one’s personal growth and potential in our everyday lives.

It occurs in everyday life, how there are different types of people interpret their lives and the lives of others. We start off by how culture effects how conscious. In the essay by Annie Dillard, shows an exponential example on a game that she used to play throughout her childhood. For example, this game would start off by Annie Dillard hiding pennies inside sidewalks. After this, she would draw enormous arrows towards where she hides the pennies around and inside the sidewalks, Annie concluded from this that most people do not stop and waste their time on picking up a simple penny. Dillard says, “The World is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny?” (17.) This quote taken from her essay, explains how Dillard had such a different conscious thought about this game towards someone who just seen the penny. In other words, most people had a susceptible mind towards something, will more than likely be inflicted by their

    Lastly, some people can see the world differently, but the majority sees it the same. For example, in the story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker the author adds, “Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them.” What the author means in the quote is that years back a house was burned to the ground and it affected Maggie. Maggie witnessed the incident when she was younger and

Class after class, day after day, I often sense a massive amount of repetition with school. Each lesson feels more like a chore than an actual learning experience. That’s the way school has always been though, like a job. It is hard to note that there is any sort of progress being made in terms of the everyday learning experience. In his essay, Against School, educator John Taylor Gatto claims that the everyday boredom of school is truly meant to demoralize and dumb down students, destroying individuality and the ability to create independent and critical thinkers. Gatto explains how children are not really growing up, they are only getting older, indicating that public schools exist only to “cripple our kids.” By using his experience in the classroom, Gatto creates an element of pathos and develops a structure which almost fools readers into inferencing what his opinion truly is. Gatto ultimately, through these rhetorical devices, wants to ignite thoughts about what the true purpose of school is, displaying the modern day public school education as a factory to create a mindless population of students.

Students will become what their teachers believe they can become. If a teacher believes a student lacks motivation and is in the lower level class, such as the vocational track instead of the college track, often times the students won’t care or put in effort to succeed. The expectations or absence of them, damages the future of these students and their yearning for greatness. Mike Rose recounts his years in vocational school in the short story, “I Just Wanna Be Average” as he struggles with physical abuse from his teachers that utilized their power to control the ill-mannered youths, coupled with his lack of desire to learn, only to discover how one educator could transform his view on education.

In Annie Dillard’s essay “Sight into Insight” she talks about one of mankind’s most value sense, the ability to see. Annie writes about how she views the world in her very own handpicked words which results in me being so mesmerized by her writing, because she explains her picture of the world in such a matter that will disassemble, reassemble and rotate your viewpoint of the colorful world just like a Rubik’s cube. I believe the main idea in her essay “Sight into Insight” was that she tried to teach us how to perceive the world in a new way. She wants the audience and herself to see more than what meets the eye, she shows us how by letting us relieve her childhood memories and by scientifically proving the existence of “disguised” beauty.

While reading Too Cool for School by Ellis Cose I have became aware of various aspects of my ‘schooling’ experience. I realized that I may not have had the best schooling experience, but I never pushed up against the system to get any better. Throughout my life I have attended over 10 schools some very high end others bottom of the barrel. Like Cose, I always knew my intellectual abilities, but I was always so dissatisfied with my situation I didn't make the best of it. Instead of soaking up as much knowledge as possible and making a lesson out of my situation I became complacent. I started to slack off and allow myself to become stagnant to what I knew my abilities were. I allowed myself to be a product of my environment when I should I have

Growing up, I hated school. The sinking feeling I got hearing people talk about academics was distressing. Every time I heard the words “mathematics” or “language arts” used in speech I would cringe reminding myself of what I struggle with. Looking back at this struggle, I realize that it helped define the essential components of my personality. Without this hardship, I would not have the resiliency, enthusiasm, or diligence that I have today to face my educational and real - life endeavors.