Mike Rose shares his personal story to the public in “I just wanna be average”, as he reveals the many flaws within the educational system of a high school in an economically depressed neighborhood in Los Angeles. He effectively directs his arguments towards both educators and parents by utilizing emotional and logical appeals. By convincing the audience to fear that children placed on remedial tracks are being hindered rather than assisted, the author causes both awareness and a feeling of duty to change the way we handle teaching children. Rose presents his argument by aiding the reader through the eyes of his younger self as he retells the story of his years in high school. This useful perspective is utilized well by Rose, as he describes the classes and teachers of Voc. Ed. with the right amount of detail; enough for the readers to immerse …show more content…
While transitioning between his two tones in his reading, the author steps out of the main story to address the reader more directly in order to appeal to authority. He explains in a more detailed fashion why the students end up behaving so uninterestingly towards anything academic. This appeal is also logical in the sense of following the mind process of a student in a remedial class; from wanting to learn something new, to telling him or herself “Why bother?” and giving up on school. Rose presents his argument using all of the three classical appeals. He uses his emotional appeals well, and could be considered unbiased, based on his discussing both sides of the spectrum with respect to teaching. Rose wants schools to have a better program for children in need, as they are the future, they’ll be the ones in charge when they grow up, and they need to be taught well. At the end of the story, the readers are filled with hope that with this call of action, society as a whole will help these children, instead of pushing them down that economic hole that is hard to get out
The Game of School: Why We All Play It, How It Hurts Kids, and What It Will Take to Change It by Robert L. Fried is a great tool for identifying challenges in school systems and planning school reform. This book explains in great depth the problems faced by students and educators in schools today and ends with a call to action for solving these problems. Some major concepts that arise frequently throughout the book are time being wasted, students feeling powerless and the prioritization of test scores over authentic learning. Time is wasted by everyone in school and is wasted in various ways, for example students are given busy work and teachers rush through a curriculum while students learn nothing. Students, while they are the most important stakeholders, feel as though they have no control over their education.
In “I Just Wanna Be Average,” Mike Rose explains the experience being part of a school system that had no prior knowledge to have educators to teach students. Rose supports his claims by describing the different situations he had to encounter with the lack of the school system, the hopelessness of the teachers and his peers, that lead those students with no support to lead them in a direction of success. Rose purpose is to point out that; all that it was needed was a teacher that cared enough to teach and to influence those students to succeed and to never hinder the student’s learning experience because anything is possible with an little of an encouragement. In the 8th paragraph in “I Just Wanna Be Average,” Rose describes what it felt like
The Other Education Rhetorical Analysis David Brooks is a well-refined journalist for the New York Times News Paper Company. He writes many different controversial articles, that tends to focus around arguments of education. Within Brooks’ arguments he uses effective techniques to persuade the audience. In this specific column, he addresses society as a whole, but with special emphasis on students. David Brooks successfully persuades his audience through his presentation of his claim, his persuasive writing style, and his usage of emotional appeals.
Ability Profiling and School Failure by Kathleen Collins illustrates how Laura’s generalizations and lack effort to understand Jay hindered his ability to grow throughout the school year. This lack of understanding in the complexity of Jay’s learning experience reveals a greater systematic issue. Laura constantly blamed Jay’s behavior on his upbringing and labeled him as emotionally impaired. In this complex situation Laura did not look at all the possibilities for Jay’s performance in school. She had a preconceived idea of Jay’s abilities, which led her to her harsh treatment of Jay.
In Carl Singleton’s article, “What Our Education System Needs is More F’s,” he argues that students aren’t receiving the failing grades they deserve. School systems are to blame for the lack of quality in America’s education. No other recommendation for improvement will succeed. The only way to fix the American education system is to fail more students. According to Singleton, the real root of the issue is with the parents.
The text appeals to the readers for both of the examples through emotion (pathos) by describing the conditions that the students learn in and it shows how the administration doesn’t care about the well-being of the students. Mireya discusses Fremont’s academic and sanitary problems and in the court papers it states, “Some of the classrooms ’do not have air-conditioning,’ so that students ‘become red-faced and unable to concentrate’ during ‘the extreme heat of summer.’ The rats observed by children in their elementary schools proliferate at Fremont High as well. ‘Rats in eleven . . . classrooms,’ maintenance records of the school report “(Kozol 708).
In the “Against Schools” article, author John Gatto describes the modern day schooling system and its flaws. He uses several rhetorical strategies in trying to prove his point. He successfully uses all three types of rhetoric in writing this article, which includes ethos, pathos, and logos. He establishes these strategies very early, and often throughout the article. He believes one issues with today’s schooling system is boredom, and that there is a distinct difference between what it means to be educated and schooled.
He utilizes tools such as rhetorical situations and rhetorical appeals to persuade his audience. Overall, Rojstaczer is effective in utilizing rhetorical situations, ethos, and pathos in his article. However, he is ineffective in using logos to persuade his audience on why grade inflation is wrong and is need of their participation to initiate change. The main topic of the article is how grade inflation is not helping students and is a detriment to their future.
Do you think someone with a higher education-level job requires more from the worker than someone that started working right from high school? Or do you think that not going to college after high school means that you just stop learning? One of Mike Rose’s main ideas in the Blue-Collar Brilliance is the question, is there really a difference between white and blue collar worker? Mike Rose is being persuasive in the text because he shows how his family went through blue collar work. I think Mike Rose is being persuasive in writing this.
A recent study released by Pearson that questioned over 400,000 students in grades 6-12 shows that only “48% of students think their teachers care about them…and only 45% of students think teachers care if they are absent from school” (Hare, 2015). This shocking statistic demonstrates what American students think about their teachers. Most students are under the impression that their teachers don’t care about them. When teachers don’t care about their students and allow them to fail, many students with unrealized potential give up on education. Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” describes his journey through high school on the vocational track after the results of his “tests got confused with those of another student named Rose” (Rose, 1989, p. 2).
The main argument is that perceived throughout the reading is that the schools itself is failing students. They see a student who may not have the greatest test scores or the best grades, and degrade them from the idea of being intellectual. Graff states, “We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic” (Graff 244). Schools need to channel the minds of street smart students and turn their work into something academic.
Rhetorical Analysis of Mike Rose Emotional, ethical, and logical appeals are all methods used in writing to perused you one way or another on various topics. Mike Rose used all of these techniques in this essay, to show how student who are pushed aside, distracted, or fall behind and fail. In this essay Rose describes that students who have teachers who are unprepared, or incompetent majorly contribute to student failure. He is trying to show that many children have potential that is overlooked or sometimes even ignored, by authority.
The essay intends to persuade and provoke the reader. By using non-statistical based evidence Gatto manages to build a solid case for their being problems with the education system, however, his solution to these problems is incredibly lackluster. The solution Gatto presents is simply for the reader to teach their own children, rather than have them schooled. The problem with this is that this solution will only ever apply to people who read Gatto’s essay, it fixes none of the problems with the education system. The lackluster solution is even more sad since Gatto presents good evidence that the issues are systemic, and by ignoring a potential solution the essay reads more like a consumer warning than a serious treatise on the education
What this essay is saying about students and education is there is no student who doesn’t want to learn or what’s to get an education. Everybody is capable of learning, but the problem is sometimes the education are given by people who don’t care if you are learning or not. In this essay, we learned that the author was put in classes where the teachers didn’t care too much about their students and because of this he become a mediocre student. Not because he didn’t like school or he was lazy, but because there was no inspiration in learning. Luckily, Mike Rose the author of I Just Wanna Be Average found someone that wants him to start learning someone that make him change his mind.
Using logos, such as statistical evidence and facts, to substantiate his arguments, Moore engages his readers in his story. Moore 's strong emotions on the subject of the failing American school system are well expressed in this selection and are used to make the nation 's residents aware of the level of stupidity America has reached.