Blue Collar Brilliance Summary

Intelligence is what gets us by everyday; it gets us jobs and helps to provide for ourselves and others. I'm not saying you need to be the smartest person ever to be successful, but you at least have to be smart enough. Gladwell mentions that "Langan’s IQ is 30 percent higher than Einstein’s. But that doesn’t mean Langan is 30 percent smarter than Einstein. That’s ridiculous. All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics, they are both clearly smart enough." You can be the smartest person ever about one thing, but you have to be at least smart enough to get through everyday

Intellectualism is the factor of being intellect or intelligent. The idea of what it means to be educated can be interpreted many different ways by different people. Some think it’s having a 4.0 and going to Harvard, while others believe in the idea of having common sense. In the essay, “Hidden Intellectualism,” Gerald Graff reflects how lack of education is viewed negatively in society. On top of that, a question also lies what it means to educated. In order to be truly educated, a person should be well rounded not in just tests of intelligence, but the tests of life as well.

Scrolling through social media, one would see a lot of posts from accounts called RelatableGifs2016, or SchoolMemes101. From the names of the accounts one can make an educated guess about they might post. Relatable pictures. When something is familiar it becomes more understandable, and people tend to empathize more with something if they can have a connection with it. In his essay, Mike Rose focuses on three personal references to allow his reader to understand the purpose of his work “Blue Collar Brilliance”.

UCLA Professor Mike Rose explain intelligence should not be measure by the level of school students completed and students can be successful in the work field or without finish school. In fact, Rose used his mother as an example of students might have intelligence without finish school. For instance, his mother drop off school in middle school who is a waitress at the coffee shop she has intelligence to memorize all the customer. According to Rose “he observe and studied the working habits of blue-collar job workers and have come to

Malcolm Gladwell insists that IQ is not the determining factor in one’s ability to achieve success because he believes that opportunity and chance play critical roles in one’s journey to achieve success. In Outliers, Gladwell includes Christopher Langan story growing up. Langan has an IQ of one ninety-five, “The average person has an IQ of one hundred… Einstein one fifty” (Gladwell 70). Langan is considered “the smartest man in America” and sometimes “the smartest man in the world”. He is also a college dropout, due to financial difficulty and other factors. Langan has a special ability, but his circumstances held him back from graduating college. Living in a life of poverty growing up, Langan did not have such opportunity that Gates had due to his circumstances. Langan has one of the highest IQ and that did not determine his success because he has not reach the level of success with his ability. What Gladwell means when he suggests that IQ reaches a point of diminishing returns after reaching 130 is after reaching 130 or surpassing it, IQ stop mattering. Having a higher IQ does not matter after 130, having enough does because intelligence has a threshold.

In the essay “Blue-Collar Brilliance” it begins with a fairly detailed description of Mike Rose’s mother at her work as a waitress in Los Angeles during the 1950’s, when he was a child. Mike Rose is a professor at the UCLA graduate school of education and information studies. This article originally appeared in 2009 in the American Scholar, a magazine published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Rose’s intended audience for this article is white collar workers, who usually hold a negative perspective towards their colleagues who aren’t as well educated as them. Mike Rose uses his mother and uncle as examples of his argument that those without formal education have important kinds of intelligence as well just in different ways. He also points out that people assume less time in school means that a person is less intelligent.

The reading "Hidden Intellectualism" by Gerald Graff reflects views on being "street smart" and "book smart." He explains that society tends to associate people who are intelligent on solely being "book smart" and performing well in academics, rather than being street smart. He goes on to further explain that students perhaps can be intelligent on topics that interest them. Graff opens up the reading by giving his own personal experience on feeling torn between trying to prove that he was smart yet fearing that he was overdoing it. He was trying to prove that he learned just as much about the real world by reading his sports books and magazines as he would have if he had read the classic works of literature like most students in school. Essentially,

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.

There is an important theme in the story Flowers for Algernon By Daniel Keyes. It is a fiction novel about a thirty year old man who has been battling to overcome an intellectual deficit all of his life and has an opportunity to become more intelligent than he ever had imagined through an experimental operation. He takes the opportunity and in a few weeks he becomes a genius for a short time before his itelligence receded as fast as it increased. The author includes many important themes throughout the passage. Daniel Keyes develops the theme that intelligence doesn’t affect who you truly are through Charlie’s experiences both before and after the operation.

“Intelligence is closely associated with formal education- the type of schooling a person has, how much and how long- and most people seem to move comfortably from that notion to a belief that work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence” (Rose). What Rose is trying to infer is that just because you are labeled blue collar: meaning you have to earn your income from manual labor, and have lack of educational knowledge, does not mean you cannot earn the knowledge in your work career. There are many opportunities to learn from your job even if you are less experienced. “...One who is so intelligent about so many things in life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work. What doesn’t occur to us, though, is that schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street

“Hidden Intellectualism,” by Gerald Graff starts off with an older argument between being book smart and street smart. Throughout the reading, Graff uses his own life experiences to critique the education system today. Points made focus on the idea of overlooking the intellectual potential of those who come across as being, “street smart”. Different authors cited in the reading to show how to accept another’s different intellectual. However, we realize that people who come across as being intellectual weren’t always labeled as that.

In the article, “The War on Stupid People”, Freedman depicted the emphasis the society has placed on determining or facilitating human capacity has failed the less intelligent people. Freedman detailed his argument by providing evidence on how intelligence played a huge role in employment opportunities and academic performance. Moreover, he illustrated the issue of the economically disadvantaged/less intelligent, the current approach is flawed in the favoring the intelligent. He asserted with the evolution of the view of intelligence to the point as becoming a detrimental measure for human worth. He developed his main message by first established a neutral tone by providing statistical evidence of what a significant role intelligence has played,

He explains how he observed different types of blue-collar and service workers in action, and came to the conclusion that each of these tasks have a skill that takes a lot of mind power to master. Their work is educational at every degree. Blue-collar workers develop intelligence and skills in a workplace through proper planning, problem solving, social interactions and multitasking. Most blue collar jobs are constantly faced with new problems every day, in the midst of busy schedules, that demand instant solution. Blue Collar jobs require just as much intelligence as jobs that require formal academic credentials. Mike Rose disagrees with the assumption that “Intelligence is closely associated with formal education” (Mike, 247). Formal education does not always measure the level of intelligence of a person. Education as something people can gain not only in school, but every day of their lives. We should be learning from our experiences, and apply this knowledge to our everyday lives. Wisdom should not be looked at as just

In first grade we had to draw a picture of what we would be doing 20 years from then. We had to draw what job we would have, what our hair would look like, what we would be wearing, and I chose to draw a picture of me drawing a picture. As a first grader I knew that my future would mirror what I was doing in that exact moment; I would still have curly hair, and I would still be an artist. Loudly proclaiming that I was going to be an artist when I grew up was ok in elementary school, but at the end of middle school it was often challenged with “but what are you really going to be?” The simple thought that I really couldn’t want to just be an artist confused me more than it embarrassed me, but it embarrassed me enough to

In Gerald Graff 's essay “Hidden Intellectualism” starts of by talking about the stereotype of being so called “street smart” and and being “book smart” and how in school when you see someone who is street smart but doesn’t do go in school get a bad wrap. People look at them as a waste because they can’t apply there intelligences that they have and use it towards school, so people view them as not the right kind of smart because they are not a A student in school. Graff then goes on to say that maybe it is not the students that are the problem with how they do in school but maybe it is the school that have missed or overlooked the intellectual potential that kids with street smarts have. Graff also says that we only view the educated minds through schooling as the right way and schools and colleges look at kids who do not like school and don’t do well as anti-intellectual people. As Graff continues his essay he says that he was on the side of being more anti-intellectual and he found that through sports he was more interested in sports then he was in school. He would use this love for sports to build up his hidden intellectualism with sports. I think that Graff is right about what he is talking about with how we as a society think if you want to be smart them you need to do well in school and get all A’s or then you are not that smart. In all reality there are many times that kids go through school and don’t do well not because they are not smart,but because people don’t