I Just Wanna Be Average Essay

The main point of Mike Rose’s Essay “I Just Wanna Be Average” is that being average is not the only thing for you to do. Throughout the essay he talks about how he started at the lowest part of the class. Where all the kids who weren’t doing very well in school or kids who didn’t really care much about school. He went through some hard times during his life and he failed at many things in school and wasn’t getting the best grades. However, he showed compassions in Biology. He did very well and actually got put in college prep classes, where the smarter kids in his school were. Rose is trying to say that there is a lot more to education than what most kids want from it, which is just doing the minimum and getting C’s. When Rose was placed

Rose was placed, in error, in a vocational group of students, which was a lower level. He spent two years in that track before being rescued by

Upon being over qualified to make his claim, he also appeals to the emotions of the audience by telling several personal stories and relating to the audience. He tells short anecdotes about teachers, mostly bad, to emphasize how poorly qualified the teachers are. He talks about one specific encounter with a gym teacher who was an ex-lineman; he claims “He routinely had us grabbing our ankles to receive his stinging paddle across our butts.” He goes on to tell a personal story about how the same teacher asks him, “Rose, do you know what sound a bag of shit makes?” Rose answers, “No, sir.” The teacher proceeds to hit him with the paddle. Rose says this in order to emphasize how terrible the teachers were. Not only does he only talk about how bad his gym teacher was, but he mentions

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.

“I Just Wanna Be Average”, is a book written by Mike Rose, which goes into detail about how he went through an education system that wasn’t designed for himself, but more so for the students that we’re not so smart. In this environment he was with both teachers and students that didn’t care much about school. He went to describe how even though the students wasn’t very educated many of them was special in their own ways, while others just never tried in school. One of the students he meet was Ken Harvey, who when asked about their opinion on working hard to reach their goals said, “I just wanted to be average”. Rose questioned why Harvey would settle for less than he had potential for. During Rose’s sophomore year his teacher checked his school

Rose’s test results got confused with another student named Rose so he was placed in the vocational track; placed in classes that meant “dead ends”. Many of his teachers did not have the desire to be role models and mentors instead they were driven to violence. “My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and unstable man, when his class drifted away from him, which

In Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average”, readers can determine from what he says that teachers play an integral role in the educations of students. When others are teaching you what to do, it becomes easier to understand; when others are not teaching you, it becomes harder to understand. You can tell how essential a teacher is to a student if you were to read Rose’s narrative and see that: students float to expectations, if teachers don’t expect anything of you they won’t help you, and how beneficial it is to have a teacher who challenges you to be better.

Rose writes about his high school educational experiences after he is inadvertently placed in vocational education when the results from his placement tests are confused with another student named Rose. Vocational education is a "euphemism for the bottom level." Rose went to school at a time when tracking, or sorting students by the results of placement tests was common in public education. Rose recounts his experiences in vocational education in order to elaborate on the problems of such system. The author calls the vocational track "a place for those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected." To further aggravate Rose's situation his parents lack the capacity or understanding of the educational system in order to question his inappropriate placement. "How would someone like Tommy Rose, with his two years of Italian schooling, know what to ask? And what sort of pressure could an exhausted waitress apply? The error went undetected, and I remained in the vocational track for two years." However the most significant issue raised

Rose conveys his argument by describing the education background of both his mother and uncle. His mother did not have much of an educational background. She dropped out of school in the 7th grade and

However, the sources differed immensely through the use of language. In fact, one of the themes most evident amongst the language that set the sources apart rhetorically was the tone. Throughout the article “Blue-Collar Brilliance,” Mike Rose set a very serious tone discussing the matter of economic inequality. For example, Rose conveys “As a foreman, Joe constantly faced new problems and became a constant multi-tasker, evaluation a flurry of demands quickly, parceling out physical and mental resources, keeping a number of ongoing events in his mind, returning to whatever task had been interrupted, and maintain a cool head under the pressure of grueling production schedules” (1037). As Rose portrays the life of a Foreman, he keeps a very serious tone to convey to the audience how real these struggles are. Although Joe may have not received a formal education passed middle school, he still has to work efficiently and intelligently in his own manner. At the same

Alison Kong EN 102 The education system in America is broken according to “Lives on the Boundary” by Mike Rose. In this excerpt Mike Rose gives the audience a greater understanding about the decline of the education system. Rose gives examples of how and why education should be equal for everyone. Also, that the importance of great books and a proper curriculum is very significant to our education system. Rose further explains to his audience that these “Great Books” don’t contain real experiences that students could eventually come across during their time at school.

He worked with men that would dread going to work and worry about what they would do if they lost their job. "Factory life has shown me what my future might have been like had I never gone to college in the first place." The job at the factory showed him what it could be like if he did not have any other options. It was one thing to go through the exhaustion of working, but witnessing what stress came along with the job was another. The author realized how grateful he was to have the life that he did because most of the factory workers never had an education. I believe the point of his article was to show what these lessons taught him. Andrew Braaksma says "the things that factory work has taught me--how lucky I am to get an education, how to work hard, how easy it is to lose that work once you have it--are by no means earth-shattering."(paragraph. 9). This demonstrates the author mentally putting himself in different circumstances and attempting to relate to the individuals around

In Andrew Braaksma's essay, Some Lessons from The Assembly Line, he compares the differences of his summer jobs, in factories, to his college life. This article is about a college student who suddenly realizes what could possibly happen if he didn't attend college. He explains how working at factory jobs during his summer breaks have given him reasons to take his education more seriously than what he had been. The article's theme of Braaskma valuing his education is explaining how factory life had shown him what he might be doing if not in school, realizing he took his education for granted, and the valuable lessons he was taught. Braaskma's goal is to explain how he came to value his education more by being inspired by the factories that

Brilliance,” Mike Rose, is a professor of education and information studies at the University of