Kristian Mentor
11/17/12
Both Mike Rose and Richard Rodriguez shared fairly different views on how growing up in school affected their lives; they hated it. “I just wanna be average” and “The achievement of desire” express the feeling that their author’s severely disliked their childhoods, and blaming most of the negative points in that time period where they were attending school. In fact, they are almost the exact opposites of each other. In “I just wanna be average”, Rose writes his extreme dislike for the school system, and his undedicated, unfocused, nonchalant attitude on school. He hated history, textbooks, chemistry, math, and Shakespeare, and thought of them to be a waste of time. Rose would’ve rather spent his time with his friends, hanging out, and playing sports. Nearing the end of his highschool life, Rose was able to understand the importance of an education, and with help from his teachers, he was able to go to college despite his grades, and become a successful writer. However, this was obviously not the case in Rodriguez’s story. School, studying, they were all his ways to escape the reality he was, but at the same time, this hurt him. He was smart, however, he was incredibly socially inactive, and even disliked his family and heritage due his better education. Life at home was a horrible, as it felt more of a competition between people, then an actual family. Rodriguez often corrected his parents on their grammatical mistakes, with the intentions of hurting his parents, because of this. According to Rodriguez, education is nothing but imitation, as he realized he never truly learned anything, he just came to memorize various known terms. Basically, both Mike Rose and Richard Rodriguez share a major dislike for the school system, and its effects on their upbringing. Based on my own experiences with the school system, I have to say, I fairly dislike it. It’s been a while since I’ve actually been able to get help from my parents, and I feel alien to their conversations. Not only that, but many teacher’s I’ve had were not so much as teachers, but instructors. They merely relayed information, without providing concise information on the why, without ever truly explaining the concepts of what we were trying to learn. It would always be, just because, or due to what someone from nearly 250 years ago had proved,
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