The Challenges Of Richard Rodriguez, Mike Rose And Gerald Graff

Three professors Richard Rodriguez, Mike Rose and Gerald Graff give problems students encounter in the United States and the entire world through their own experiences. Though the experiences are similar with small variations, they view their challenges in different regards and outline solutions to what according to them are the main difficulties students face in school. This article, therefore, gives an analysis of encounters of the three professors throughout their education including the challenges they had at the beginning and the solutions they had by the end of their educational career.

Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American immigrant from San Francisco, California attempts to outline the meaning of the term achievement of desire. He …show more content…
To Rodriguez, being scholarship boy was more than more being intelligent. Being “scholarship boy” proved to Richard his success in school indicates and showed that to make his love for school grow and make himself the way he was, he had to be different from his classmates and had to exclude himself from his family life to be successful. There appears to be a balance inside of him, due to the fact he had to live in two different worlds and sustain both of them to make him successful at the end of his studies. But as he grows the balance between these two worlds grows smaller and smaller. Rodriguez began to value his school teachers more than his parents, and through his perspective they were the ones that mattered more to him in the …show more content…
Most of Mike Rose’s audience concur with his ideas because of the relevancy in the experience. Ideally, it is clear that Rose had an intention or lack of it in schools. From the article, it is apparent Rose did not outline much of his efforts in his schooling career as one would expect. “I developed further into a somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to handle: I detested Shakespeare; 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” (Rose 185) From this excerpt, it is clear Rose acknowledges the guilt of mediocrity in him. He admits that he did whatever was within his reach to stay afloat in his school career. A confirmation that Rose was motivated to simply run-through his education and at the time, he did not realize the worth of his studies. Rose talks about how school is not the right place to make one successful and that teachers are the main contributors in making sure one is not successful through education. Students, “will float to the mark you set” (Rose 2012). Meaning that students will do the bare minimum the absolutely can in the classroom, just to pass the class. In this article, Rose believes that all students’ motivation is