What is average, or even above average? Who has the right to determine whether we are average, or have the potential to be more than that? How is our social class determined at the end of the day...is it based on our knowledge, motivation, and want? Or is it based off of what someone thinks we are capable of due to our test taking strategies? There are many concerns this day in age of education and its practices, Mike Rose highlights many of them in his article "I JUST WANNA BE AVERAGE". Although Mike Rose is not average in anyway, he goes on to discuss his upbringing and his experiences going through the education system. There are many common stories within his story that many of us can relate to in some way.
In The article "I JUST WANNA …show more content…
It wasn't just that I didn't know things - didn't know how to simplify algebraic fractions, couldn't identify different kinds of clauses, bungled Spanish translations - but that I had developed various faulty and inadequate ways of doing algebra and making sense of Spanish. Worse yet, the years of defensive tuning out in elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly while seeming at least half alert. During my time in Voc. Ed., I developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to handle: I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with history. My attention flitted here and there. I fooled around in class and read my books indifferently - the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I did what I had to do to get by, and I did it with half a mind."(126). This explains how Rose dealt with the unconventional ways of the education system and how he learned to adapt to it. Anyone can relate to Rose's quote about doing things in class with half a mind in school. This can be frustrating when in school because of boredom or lack of interest, the subject matter fails to go informed thoroughly. This especially relates to when educators places students in a tutoring program for reading and writing which includes- reading a book a week and …show more content…
Through his writing he crafts the ideas that we need the education system to lay down the foundation for a student. Although it should not define their careers and the way they conduct their lives and affairs. He employs these ideas through his writing in many ways, one quote being- "Let me be the first to admit that there was a good deal of adolescent passion in this embrace of the avant-garde: self-absorption, sexually charged pedantry, an elevation of the odd and abandoned. Still it was a time during which I absorbed an awful lot of information: long lists of titles, images from expressionist paintings, new wave shibboleths, snippets of philosophy, and names that read like Steve Fusco's misspellings - Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Now this is hardly the stuff of deep understanding. But it was an introduction, a phrase book, a [travel guide] to a vocabulary of ideas, and it felt good at the time to know all these words. With hindsight I realize how layered and important that knowledge was. It enabled me to do things in the world. I could browse bohemian bookstores in far-off, mysterious Hollywood; I could go to the Cinema and see events through the lenses of European directors; and, most of all, I could share an evening, talk that talk, with Jack MacFarland, the man I most admired at the time. Knowledge was becoming a bonding
In The article "I JUST WANNA …show more content…
It wasn't just that I didn't know things - didn't know how to simplify algebraic fractions, couldn't identify different kinds of clauses, bungled Spanish translations - but that I had developed various faulty and inadequate ways of doing algebra and making sense of Spanish. Worse yet, the years of defensive tuning out in elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly while seeming at least half alert. During my time in Voc. Ed., I developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to handle: I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with history. My attention flitted here and there. I fooled around in class and read my books indifferently - the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I did what I had to do to get by, and I did it with half a mind."(126). This explains how Rose dealt with the unconventional ways of the education system and how he learned to adapt to it. Anyone can relate to Rose's quote about doing things in class with half a mind in school. This can be frustrating when in school because of boredom or lack of interest, the subject matter fails to go informed thoroughly. This especially relates to when educators places students in a tutoring program for reading and writing which includes- reading a book a week and …show more content…
Through his writing he crafts the ideas that we need the education system to lay down the foundation for a student. Although it should not define their careers and the way they conduct their lives and affairs. He employs these ideas through his writing in many ways, one quote being- "Let me be the first to admit that there was a good deal of adolescent passion in this embrace of the avant-garde: self-absorption, sexually charged pedantry, an elevation of the odd and abandoned. Still it was a time during which I absorbed an awful lot of information: long lists of titles, images from expressionist paintings, new wave shibboleths, snippets of philosophy, and names that read like Steve Fusco's misspellings - Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Now this is hardly the stuff of deep understanding. But it was an introduction, a phrase book, a [travel guide] to a vocabulary of ideas, and it felt good at the time to know all these words. With hindsight I realize how layered and important that knowledge was. It enabled me to do things in the world. I could browse bohemian bookstores in far-off, mysterious Hollywood; I could go to the Cinema and see events through the lenses of European directors; and, most of all, I could share an evening, talk that talk, with Jack MacFarland, the man I most admired at the time. Knowledge was becoming a bonding