Critical Response Paper to Mike Rose’s I Just Wanna Be Average Essay

In his essay I exactly Wanna Be Average, Mike rosaceous details his school keep in South L. A. Now a professor of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, lift moves through secondary school at Our Lady of benevolence on the Voc. Ed. Track, revealing why the standardized versions of this educational system break down the core values behind liberal, humanistic education as we visualize it. As Rose wants to stress the value of all individuals, the discrepancies between their existing intellectual capacities and how the system classified and treated them, he paints his fellow students in Vocational Education in great detail.His title comes from plenty Harvey, who, among the numerous colorful characters and lively Ameri throw outs Rose met, dropped the defining one-liner of his entire Voc. Ed. Experience We were talk of the town about the parable of the talents, about achievement, working hard, doing the best you can do, blah-blah-blah, when the instructor called on the res tive plenty Harvey for an opinion. Ken thought about it, moreover just for a second, and said (with studied, minimal affect), I just wanna be average. That woke me up.Average? Who wants to be average? At the time, I thought Kens assertion was stupid, and I wrote him off. nevertheless his sentence has stayed with me all these years, and I think I am finally coming to understand it (Rereading America, 186). Rose goes on to attempt to clarify his understanding of this one-liner and how it fits in Americas education system. He reveals how Ken Harvey was trying to protect himself, by fetching on with a vengeance the identity implied in the vocational continue (187).Rose himself was lucky, switching to College Prep and meeting a belated measure intellectual-turned-educator named Jack MacFarland, and a hard-nosed science teacher named crony Clint. These characters brought a college preparatory curriculum to a place and students who had neer seen it before. And Rose reveals how clas sism and racialism most often prevent that from happening, wasting entire American populations in entire communities deliberately, all while demanding higher standards and accountability, when the real efforts are never made, save in name and sprinkled across the land as media headlines.Roses essay reveals the multitude of challenges that students face, from struggles with family at ages that leave them ill-prepared to handle the stirred up fall-out, to struggles with the emergence into a broader American world, to engaging in their own growing sexuality and its uncertain role in the context of their lives work, and dreams, and the sense of possibilities of what life can or cannot be. I think Rose does a great job bringing this school in South Los Angeles to life. I can hear Ken Harvey, and see Jack MacFarland.When we hear him diagnose Kens problem, and his response to it, hes very believable. He describes how kids aspire assigned to Voc. Ed. , being defined as slow. And he reve als the results Youll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to act stupidity. I wonder though, what he thinks the answers are. Is it smaller classes, or teachers that care? Obviously, Brother Clint and Jack MacFarland are teachers that care, and work hard to connect with every student. But not all teachers are like that, right?