Blue collar brilliance by Mike Rose is an article about Mike Rose and his life also the blue-collar people and their jobs. How people who work blue collar jobs are just as smart as people with degrees. Blue collar people are just as smart or even smarter in some ways than people who have a degree. The story starts off with Mike Rose and his dad going to his mom restaurant and him observing how everyone works together. His mom must deal with situation on the fly like the food being made wrong and having to take it back to the cook and explaining it to him and hoping he doesn't flip out and makes the food right this time, to people coming in hungry and wanted food right away or being mean because they are hungry. In the first part of the article, there is a lot of repetition with the restaurant. There is a lot repetition with his …show more content…
family dropping out of school. With his mom dropping out of school in the seventh grade also with some of her siblings dropping out through high school to find work in railroad yards, factories, or restaurants. His father finished a grade or two in primary school in Italy. Some more repetition in the article you have Mike talking about blue, white, pink collar jobs. There is a lot of contrast in the story it is the bulk of the story.
You have Mike Rose going to college, and his family barely got out of high school. Another one is where you have what school teaches you and what on the job teaches are different a lot of time like in the article he says, "For Joe, the shop floor provided what school did not"(Rose, 2017, p4). Joe is Mike uncle, and he dropped out of high school at the ninth grade. The big contrast of the story is the big collar people vs. the people who have the degree, and which one is smarter. His argument for the blue-collar people he went around to people who have blue collar jobs and cataloged the cognitive demands of a range of blue-collar and service jobs to gain a sense of how knowledge and skill develop. For the argument for the other side he did the same thing but for people that have degrees like, for example, people who are scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals that are rich with detail about the intellectual dimension of their work. They found the people who learn on the job know more about their job than the people who have a degree in their
work. I feel there is some anomaly in the article like for example more reading occurs in the blue-collars workplace from manuals and catalogs to work orders and invoices, to lists, labels, and forms. Another one would be Mike aunts and uncles that drop out of high school are still doing good and making a living not just for them but their family too. How the waitress remembers who order what when they have like five tables and about four people at each table. One of the biggest ones I think there is in the article is Mike Rose is a research professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. He is the author of 12 books, most recently a 10th-anniversary edition of the mind at work. The reason I find this is the biggest one of everything because of his family and everything you would have thought he would have a blue-collar job. People with degrees are just as smart has people who work blue-collar jobs or even smarter at there field they learned by hand and in field than by a school teaching them. The study Mike Rose did to prove that in the article Blue-Collar Brilliance. After reading this article I couldn’t agree more with Mike. This is a great article to read for anyone young, old and everyone in between.
We, as a society, feel the need to draw imaginary lines to separate ourselves whether it’s the line between color of our skin, our religion differences, our political beliefs, or the status of our class. As much as I wish there wasn’t a defining line between high class and the educated vs. low class and uneducated, there is. In Mike Rose’s narrative essay “Blue-Collar Brilliance,” he describes his mother’s lack of education and her hard labor work which is the quote on quote the blue collar working class.
He claims to relate his mother’s quick and effective decisions, customer interactions, memorisation and problem solving, and his uncle, Joe’s, learning, planning and management skills to that of a white-collar worker. “Preposterous”, some might argue. “You cannot possibly compare waiters and conductors with boffins.” However, the dichotomy between the blue-collars and white-collars are subtle. Regardless of Rose’s claim that blue-collar workers are more efficient and carry a broader skill set, there exists no comparison between the two categories. Granted, the social biases about one’s occupation are irrational; however, blue-collars cannot substitute white-collar workers merely because of their “diverse intelligence”. Given Rose’s experiences, he has colluded blue-collar intelligence with white-collar intelligence. Id Est, he believes that social discrimination against blue-collar workers is fallacious from his observations; thus, their skills are the analogous to white-collar workers. In sum, blue-collar workers are intelligent and important in their respective and applicable fields, and white-collars in theirs’; drawing comparisons between them are like comparing apples and
Rose begins his article with his first rhetorical strategy of storytelling and description to describe his mother and uncle’s work environments and the hardship they go through. As a child, he would go to his mother’s work to watch her, “Rosie took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while fielding questions about the food. She walked full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand.” (Rose 1) Another example that we see Rose’s use of storytelling is when he was brought to his uncle’s factory. “Joe took me on a tour of the factory. The floor was loud—in some places deafening—and when I turned a corner or opened a door, the smell of chemicals knocked my head back. The work was repetitive and taxing, and the pace was inhumane.” (Rose 3) He uses these moments to relate to you and show you the hardship they go through in their workforce. Rose wants his audience to understand that blue-collar workers, even though they don’t have a proper education for their trade, that have the hands on experience to gain the proper knowledge they need to know to successfully complete their job. He’s showing the type of environment they work in and the chaos that’s
In an ever so changing society it is expected that principals such as education, demographics and much more continue to evolve each day. While most criticize society, others try to define it. Mike Rose, a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Informational studies, is well known for his writing on issues of literacy. The article Blue-Collar Brilliance, written by Mike Rose, originally appeared in 2009 in the American Scholar magazine. The article not only presents a strong claim, but it also includes personal narratives, which increases the author 's credibility. In addition, connections between the opposing side and sufficient visuals strengthen Rose’s argument as a whole.
In the article, “Blue-Collar Brilliance” by Mike Rose, he begins with an anecdote of his mother working her blue-collar job at a diner as a waitress. Rose vividly describes her common day that is packed with a constant array of tedious tasks she has to accomplish to make her living. The authors goal appears to be making the reader appreciate the hard work of blue-collar workers because society places a stereotype on them as being less intelligent than someone with more schooling or even a white-collar job: “Our cultural iconography promotes the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no brightness behind the eye, no inmate that links hand and brain” (282). I agree with Rose’s conclusion that if we continue to place a stigma on
Blue Collar workers today are looked down upon by most of society. People think that if you have a blue collar job you aren’t smart and not successful. But in my opinion, blue collar workers are the backbone of our society, and deserve the same amount of respect as white collar workers. “Blue Collar Brilliance by Mike Rose” explains how blue collar workers are very smart and use a lot of brainpower to get their jobs done. Both his Uncle and mother were blue collar workers and that’s where he got his inspiration to stand up for blue collar workers around the world. He gives us examples of how his own family members were blue collar workers and how they were smart and how they excelled at their jobs. He uses his own experiences to show us that blue collar workers are in fact smart, able to adapt to many different situations, and deserve respect.
However, his argument that the most employable degrees are those in science and math is poor. If his argument was as compelling as he seems to think it is then he should be able to cite a source for his assertion more directly. Instead, he uses several roundabout arguments to convince the reader. Furthermore, his argument that we should incentivize these programs relies on the assumption that college should, primarily, result in employment. This involves very clear assumptions regarding what the value of an education
Is it better to be book smart or street smart? Is it better to be happy and stable or unhappy and ‘rich’? Blue-collar jobs require you to learn skills that college cannot teach you; Rose points this out in his essay, stating: “It was like schooling, where you’re constantly learning” (277). In the essay “Blue Collar Brilliance” written by Mike Rose, he talks about how his mother worked as a waitress and how his uncle Joe dropped out of high school, eventually got a job working on the assembly line for General Motors and was then moved up to supervisor of the paint and body section. Rose suggests that intelligence is not represented by the amount of schooling someone has or the type of job they work. In this essay I will be explaining why Rose
Through the various types of texts I went through, Mike Rose’s article on “Blue-Collar Brilliance” was the one that I felt I could personally relate to. I grew up in a family where manual labor was the key to a good income. Out of my entire family, I was the only one who graduated high school and went to college, therefore I grew up realizing that people didn’t necessarily need a college education to be considered “smart”. My father has been one of the smartest people in my family, I could explain my calculus homework to him and he would be able to quickly grasp all the equations and concepts, even though he dropped out of high school as a freshman in Mexico. In the fall of 2015, I decided to skip a semester of college to find job opportunities outside of the education field.
Mike Rose’s article “Blue-Collar Brilliance” talks about people judging other people’s intelligence based on their jobs. Mike Rose explains in his article that people with blue collar jobs are just as intelligent as people with white collar jobs because they both use critical thinking and multi task while they are working. The standard of their jobs might be different because of their different ways of learning. People who are considered professionals or white collared individuals learn by studying or reading reports where blue collared individuals learn by performing a task. They learn faster ways to perform the task after they have done it multiple times. I believe that Rose’s thinking is very effective as it tells us that we should not judge
In “ Blue Collar Brilliance” Mike Rose argues that intelligences can’t be measured by the education we received in school but how we learn them in our everyday lives. He talks about his life growing up and watching his mother waitressing at a restaurant. He described her orders perfectly by who got what, how long each dish takes to make, and how she could read her customers. He also talks about his uncles working at the General Motors factory and showed the amount of intelligence that was need to work at the factory. Rose goes on talking about the different types of blue-collar and how he came up with the idea that a person has skills that takes a lot of mind power to achieve.
In the essays, Two Year Are Better than Four by Liz Addison, and Blue Collar Brilliance by Mike Rose respectively, take two different approaches to learning. Addison firmly believes in the traditional method by advocating community college is the better choice for students to experience higher education. Addison also asserts community colleges offer the same level of education compared to four universities. She also emphasized in her writing the value of the experience is much more personal due to the smaller classes in community college. On the other hand, Mike Rose observes that higher education does not define a person’s intelligence. Rose believes that society plays a big part in the judgmental view towards people without degrees. Yet the same society fail to recognize that blue collar jobs such as plumbers and waitresses require specific kinds of intelligence just like Rose’s mother Rosie, whom he described as an example of blue collar brilliance. Even though Addison and Rose take
The articles “Blue-Collar Brilliance” has an excellence style that is very organized that helps the reader understand and collect their thoughts. The author gives us many examples including the author’s mother and uncle. Further in the article the author also examines many other jobs that others may not respect in society, The examples are very effective and support the author’s point of view very well. The article states “Eight years ago I began a study of the thought processes involved in work like that of my mother and uncle” (Rose 910). We also learn that the author has been researching and studying his topic for many years which shows us that the information is credible. The author uses very good language and tone while addressing the reader, he may have his own opinion but he is not harsh and abrupt about it. The article also has a great amount of detail that helps the reader understand the author’s point of view clearly. An example of great detail is when the article mentions “ Planning and problem solving have been studied since the earliest days of modern cognitive psychology and are considered core elements in Western definitions of intelligence. To work is to solve problems. The big difference between the psychologist’s laboratory and the workplace is that in the former the problems are isolated and in the latter they are embedded in the real-time flow of work with
Throughout the entire article, “Blue Collar Brilliance” the author Mike Rose is trying to show the real fact of Blue Collar jobs by describing his mother work as a waitress and his uncle as a factory worker who made his way up to manager. By giving evidence, he is also trying to open the readers eye that Blue Collar workers are in a same intelligence skill as other high-level workers though they do not have four years degrees. The author, Mike Rose, passed his childhood by watching his mom as waiting on booths and table with skillfully to assemble the skill to do work efficiently. He also watched out all other workers and interested by their adaption to coexist with each other. He got the chance as a first person to attend college in his family,
Rodney K. Smith’s mere opinion of his publication is that children with a higher level are more like to secure a job rather than those with no or little education. His view is upheld by the statistics of bureau that gives a clear statistics of the percentage of the salary earned by students with higher education and that of lower education. This makes his claim more reliable and credible because the bureau of labor and statistics is a reputable institution in the United States that deals with the percentage of people who work in United State. Smith’s own personal anecdote appeals to the feelings of the audience in which it ignites them with feelings of possibility.