Wanna Be Average in I

Wanna Be Average

In "I Just Wanna Be Average

," Mike Rose describes the transition that he underwent in high school from a dead-end vocational student to a budding college bound intellectual. Rose went to a private school with some other lower class kids and was placed in vocational classes because his test scores got mixed up with somebody else. The school placed students on tracts strictly from standardized test scores and had lousy faculty, but many parents thought they were doing the right thing by sending their kids there (Rose 183). Students from a mix of cultures and backgrounds were thrown together in the vocational tract, which was not really a tract- just a collections of classes that had no real purpose to them, individually or collectively. The fact that the teachers generally gave little or no effort and the fact that Rose was not really into learning combined to cause to Rose skate through the Vocational tract, unable to self-motivate and not receiving any motivation from his teachers.

Most of what Rose learned early in high school was from his classmates. He learned from Dave Snyder to respect mature temperament as an attribute he wanted. He realized that being friends with cool kids like Dave kind of made him cool. He learned from kids like Ted Richard to respect another man's temper and how being smart and intellectual are not necessarily the same thing and that each is desirable in certain ways. All of this background sets up Rose to hear Ken Harvey say: "I just wanna be average" (186). This statement struck Rose, who found himself interpreting the statement years later. The statement meant that high school can be such a suffocating experience, including exposure to different types of people with much different ability, all the while being told by the school what to expect from yourself that it is easy for a kid to give up thinking and dreaming for him or herself. An environment of reduced expectations and motivation often becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for an adolescent who quickly learns how to be the person they are told they are (186).

When Rose was motivated by his motivating biology teacher, he excelled, leading his teacher to investigate why he was vocational education. Realizing the error, the school switched Rose to college prep. Rose was confused by the notion that he was now 'smart' and had developed bad habits in the process of teaching himself how to be 'dumb." Rose explains how the cycle of boredom and failure occurs in the classroom and that new materials are summarily dismissed by many students as a boring but new version of the old boring material. The problem is worse for students in remedial classes.

Rose found a teacher who served as educational mentor at the time when he was unsure he was academically worthy and who served as a life mentor right after his father dies. Jack MacFarland was able to forge his own identity with students as an English teacher. By being giving his all and clearly being prepared and motivated, his students, including the vocational education students, gave him their respect. One of the reasons this happened was because MacFarland was giving the students life tools they did not possess, specifically the art of communicating in the English language and a general knowledge of Western philosophy taught in a way that students could at least understand it as it was being taught to them (190).

This represents a striking contrast to the math lessons that Rose describes he and his classmates went through. The math lessons were a series of lectures in a 'foreign language' that always built upon previous lectures the students did not grasp. As a result, the students never opened their ears or minds during the math lectures. As Rose relays the 'Math' experience:

This is what a number of students go through, especially those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the Familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. (188)

Rose discusses a certain paradox regarding grades: they are at once a symbol of an educational system that obsesses over evaluation and assessment and a barometer by which underachieving and lower level students can gain an academic measure of self-esteem and enthusiasm for ongoing educational effort (191). Grades were also an important part of getting into college. Rose learned that his past academic malaise would severely hamper his ability to get into college. MacFarland, seeing both the potential and the effort, went to bat for Rose, who was accepted to a four-year college on a probationary basis.