Lives On The Boundary Analysis

In a small section of the first chapter, “Our Schools and Our Children”, in Lives on the Boundaries by Mike Rose, Rose describes his observation of an English course at the University of California, Los Angeles titled English A. He explains how it is the university’s most basic writing course and how a dean even described the students taking the class as “The truly illiterate among us.” Rose then shares his observations of the students engaging in classroom discussions about Greek culture, the origin of Greek words, and the names of Greek gods and goddesses. This part of the chapter stuck out to me because it brings back those discussions in class we had about what literacy truly is and what it means to be literate. Students and faculty at …show more content…
He writes, “I would sit there watching a teacher draw her long horizontal line and her short, oblique lines and break up sentences and put adjectives here and adverbs there and just not get it, I couldn’t see the reason for it, turned off to it.” Instead of paying attention to the lessons in class, he would daydream to ignore his feelings of inadequacy and consequently get C and D grades. To the average person, it would seem like he was an unmotivated student, but Rose’s other stories of his actions say otherwise. He tells the story of his fascination with space novels and how “Reading opened up the world.” He informs us of the many hours spent playing with his chemistry set and gazing into outer space with his telescope. Even though Rose’s grades were subpar, that didn’t mean he didn’t have any interests or practices with literacy. The story of his disregard of classroom lessons proves the point that he makes of teachers not being able to engage those students who do not do well in a classroom setting. In elementary school, Rose was unsuccessful in certain subjects, but his imagination, interests, and cleverness flourished outside of