Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary
Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary is an Educational Autobiography. The book begins at the beginning of his life and we follow him up into his adult years. The book focuses on the “struggles and achievements of America’s educationally underprepared” .
The Alien
In order to understand Mike Rose, and his book Lives on the Boundary, you must first understand where Mike is coming from and examine his past. Mike was born to a first generation immigrant family, originally from Italy. He spent his early childhood in the mid-west and then in his latter childhood, parents not knowing any better, in East Los Angeles. Mike’s father suffered from arteriosclerosis. Neither Mike’s mother nor his father had completed high school and no one in his family had ever attended college. This is the setting, background, and characters of Mike’s tale of “struggles and achievements of America’s educationally underprepared” . Through this book Mike constantly is emphasizing three main themes. First, the importance of an educational mentor; later in this treatise we will examine several of Mike’s mentors. Second, social injustices in the American education system; specifically the lack of funding and bureaucracy’s affect on the public educational system. Third and lastly, specific teaching methods that Mike has used to reach out to kids on the boundary.
Throughout Mike’s life, he had the fortunate experience of having some inspirational mentors. I have identified four of his numerous mentors as the most critical to his development, both educationally and personally.
Achieving Abnormality
The first of Mike’s mentors I would like to discuss came into his life just after his father passed away, beginning of his senior year. His name was Jack MacFarland. Jack, as described by Mike Rose is,
…a beatnik who was born too late. His teeth were stained, he tucked his sorry tie between the third and forth buttons of his shirt, and his pants were chronically wrinkled.
With a cultural background like Mike’s, survival in the American educational system is a difficult struggle at best. However, Jack helped fill in some of the critical cultural blanks. “He slowly and carefully built up our knowledge of Western intellectual history – with facts, with connections, with speculations” . And Jack served as more than simply a source of numb...
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...t seems that every-other president and every-other governor refers to himself or herself as the education president or education governor, yet they fail to deliver the necessary funding to maintain a high level of education for all of his or her constituents’ children. Why is it that class and culture is the determining factor for who receives a quality education, this social injustice must be remedied.
My Awakening
Much like Mike, I have had some amazing academic mentors that were not afraid to get down in the trenches with me and ask what I was trying to say. I had Ms. Lewis my freshmen year of high school, she would sit down with me and rip apart my paper and rework it as necessary. During my senior year of high school, I had the privilege of taking a U.W. English class that was a seminar format where the instructor would frequently conference with us, and he gave me the tools to continue my education. However, something we all need to remember, especially at PLU, is to not be afraid to be a mentor to someone else. In life, we are all teachers. We tell one another our stories, and by doing that we are teaching them what it is like to look at the world through our lens.
Fanta plays a role in Aminata’s maturation although it may seem unlikely considering they hate each other at the beginning of the novel. Aminata dislikes her because of her rude nature and Fanta didn’t like her because she considered her immature. Their relationship changes when they are taken away from their village. Fanta’s hostility is a form of defense mechanism to keep her in her right mind. Aminata adapts a similar mentality later on in the story when her son Mamadu is taken away from her and she becomes unreceptive. The second person on the ship is a pregnant woman named Sanu. Aminata delivers her baby on the boat: Aminata says to Chekura: “The woman and I will settle quietly under that big tree, over there. Leave us alone, but bring me one women to help….Go to the village and get three gourds of water…and some cloth.”(p.55). After delivering her baby, Aminata sees how Sanu loves her child and would go to extreme measure to save her. She jumped of the boat and killed herself to go after her baby girl. Although it is a crazy example to illustrate how much she cared for her baby, Aminata learned to love her own baby from Sanu. She decided to keep her child and bring it into the dreadful world in which she lived in. Basically, Aminata learns to be tough from Fanta and she inherits the trait of loving her child from
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Mozart had begun to dislike being confined as an assistant concert master, so he decided to travel with his mother to places like Mannheim, Paris, and Munich. However, the jobs he tried to get never worked out, so he was running low on money. He had to start selling his personal belongings to pay for his trips. In 1778, his mother got sick and died so Mozart had to return home to a job as a court organist. When Mozart retuned home, he was summoned to Vienna by Archbishop von Colloredo where he treated Mozart as a servant. It took Mozart a while before he was able to
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Like Rose I was also placed into classes that didn 't help me out in any other way. Classes like ELL (English language learning) and some require course like art, and some repeat classes from middle school like us history. I like history, but I don 't like classes that teaches the same subject over again. I don 't dislike ELL, but feel like it limited student ability to be creative. Having to be taught boring diction and punctuation over and over again from one ELL class to another. The classes I was put in didn 't engaged me. up till high school where I could partially take any class I want, but still was forced into an art class for two school years. I decide to write about Mike Rose piece because I had similar experience in my education.
Raquel and Melanie are two poverty stricken students that attended University Height’s High School in the South Bronx, because their school was not federal funded, it lacked resources; so it does not come as a surprise, perspective students like Melanie and Raquel have more of a ...
There seems to be obvious differences in the education system all over America. It caters the upper class majority and it is biased to the ones that serve the lower and middle class minority. There is a strong undercurrent of racial inequality in today's school systems that negatively affect the quality of education that its students receive. A schools potential to give a proper education often depends on the perspective economic, and social, or perhaps the racial backgrounds of its students.
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I gulped. This was clearly not a good start to my family’s first night as permanent staff members at Rancho 3M Orphanage in Guadalupe, Mexico. I had found myself sitting in this cinderblock structure (the only blonde-hair, blue eyed girl for a solid 200 miles) on account of my parents. They had not just decided to merely move our entire family away from our hometown, but they had decided that as a family unit, we would trade our cushy, country club lifestyle to work in an impoverished area of Mexico, caring for children who had been abandoned. We all yearned to provide for them a hope and a future: a chance for an education. To be more than just street smart. To have their existence mean more than knowing which gang is better to commit their life to. My family desired for them to be book smart.
When you look at someone, you see a person, but sometimes, you forget that that person has a story. I learned that when I watched the film, I Learn America. When I first watched the movie, I saw students that have come to America. They have come to an international school in New York to learn English. As the film goes on, you see that each of the students that they focus on have struggles that they have/had to overcome to come or stay in America. Before, I did not realize how much they had to go through in order to come to the United States. As educators, we have to get to know our students. We have to understand their lives and their backgrounds and create a good teacher-student relationship and help students build a “home away from home”.
Erin Gruwell began her teaching career at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California where the school is integrated but it’s not working. Mrs. Gruwell is teaching a class fill with at-risk teenagers that are not interested in learning. But she makes not give up, instead she inspires her students to take an interest in their education and planning for their future as she assigned materials that can relate to their lives. This film has observed many social issues and connected to one of the sociological perspective, conflict theory. Freedom Writers have been constructed in a way that it promotes an idea of how the community where the student lives, represented as a racially acceptable society. The film upholds strong stereotypes of
In the beginning of the movie, Mozart, while possessing great musical talent, is a bawdy impish jokester. When Salieri, the narrator of the movie first sees Mozart, Mozart is running on the floor with a girl, telling boorish jokes. He is angered by Mozart’s behavior, and believes that this was god’s way of mocking him-by giving him the ability to understand music, and yet using such a vile creature as his instrument. This is also proof that Mozart is an archetypal hero. Such behavior is proof of his unusual birth, which is a trait of archetypal hero; Mozart’s behavior is the result of a pampered childhood in an aristocratic family, where he was denied nothing. He also shows exceptionally rude behavior in front of the cardinal when the cardinal attempts to chastise him for being late to the performance; he opens the doors to the cardinal’s room before taking a bow outside to his crowd of admirers to deliberately show his behind to the pope. However, Mozart also shows that he possesses great musical talent. When he hears his music being played wi...
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