Educational Journey of Author Mike Rose in the Book, Lives on the Boundary

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Recommended: Education Journey

Being Average

Author: Mike Rose

Taken from his book Titled: “Lives on the Boundary”

This is a short story about the educational journey of Author and Scholar Mike Rose and how he got caught up in the vocational track for underprivileged students and how it helped, and interfered with his education and led him to his views of education today.

I believe that his goal with this writing was to help the general public to be better informed about the educational structure and how it works. I feel that Mr. Rose had a difficult time in the earlier years of his education and he wants everyone to understand that there are some very smart people out there and all they need is a system that understands them and instructors that will help them instead of burying them in the paper work or worst yet just ignore them.

Rose tells of his experiences in high school and prep school and later his college days. He contributes a lot of what he learned to his former friends and instructors. Rose spoke of a student Ken Harvey, when the instructor asked Ken his opinion about working hard, doing the best that you can do, talents and other things, Ken thought about it and replied “I just wanna be average.” (3) Rose talks about what different students do to survive in the system, what challenges they had and how some of them emerged victorious. He talks about his own deliverance from vocational education and how it started in his sophomore year with biology when “Brother Clint” (4) realized that he was getting good grades and discovered the mistake in Rose’s records and recommended College Prep. It seemed to send him into a different world. According to Rose college prep was an improvement over the vocational Education that he had just came from. He...

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... her she told me to sit down that I was too stupid to even be in her class! I was devastated. I have spent a life time trying to get past what she said and have since come to realize that I am not stupid. I like that Rose is trying to help people to understand the system and the students and to prove that coming from the other side of the tracks does not make a person stupid and that good professors can teach disadvantaged students. These students can become educated professional people like the author of this book. I agree with Mr. Rose in the fact that our education system is far from perfect, we have a long way to go but with people like Mr. Rose we do stand a chance to have a very good system.

Works Cited

Rose, Mike, Lives on the Boundary. New York: The New Press 1989. Print

Mike Rose, Biography: http://mikerosebooks.com/Home.html Web. 23 Jan 2014

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