Rose: "I Just Wanna Be Average"...

     1. In Voc. Ed., Rose was at the bottom of the heap. His teachers didn’t seem to know or care to learn how to deal with children that needed more guidance and attention. Unfortunately, I’ve had many teachers like that, but it is what it is. You deal and you do your best and you move on.

 

      2. Voc. Ed. was the exact opposite of what these students needed. They needed to have teachers who cared, and who would take the time to understand them better, as well as prepare them for life in the real world. Instead they instilled in the students a belief that they had an intellectual deficit, and the idea that their lives would never be extraordinary. While it was probably emotionally crippling, socially it brought the kids closer to each other. Rose struggled with math because not only could he not simplify algebraic fractions, but also he had learned to tune out during his classes, and tried to just get by.

      3. I feel like Ken Harvey had a distorted view of school and what it is supposed to encompass. However, it’s not his fault. It was a learned, conditioned thing that he experienced with his teachers’ lack of interest in teaching. Students like Ken Harvey tend to use humor, sarcasm, and rebellion to cope with these types of situations. In Ken’s case, he was stating the obvious: His teachers had basically told him that he’d amount to nothing, so his goals were not grand. He just wanted to be “average”.

      4. The only thing I find to be disorienting about college is balance. I am a full-time student and have 2 full-time jobs as well. So for me, getting back into school was just a matter of managing my time more efficiently. But in comparison to high school, I think that college is a breeze as far as social anxieties and pressures are concerned. We’re not here to impress each other, or to make friends. We’re here because we want to be. Because we want to learn.

      5. My experience of education was much different than Rose’s. While I’ve had several teachers in the past that clearly didn’t care about the students learning, I’ve never had one treat me like I was the “bottom of the heap”. It’s really sad to know that those teachers are out there. But who knows? Maybe a teacher’s indifference is almost as bad as telling their students that they have no future.