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Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared
The award-winning account of how America's educational system fails it students and what can be done about it
Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient--these are the stigmas that define America's educationally underprepared. Having grown up poor and been labeled this way, nationally acclaimed educator and author Mike Rose takes us into classrooms and communities to reveal what really lies behind the labels and test scores. With rich detail, Rose demonstrates innovative methods to initiate "problem" students into the world of language, literature, and written expression. This book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of a wide range of students.
Already a classic, Lives on the Boundary offers a truly democratic vision, one that should be heeded by anyone concerned with America's future.
A mirror to the many lacking perfect grammar and spelling who may see their dreams translated into reality after all. -Los Angeles Times Book Review
Vividly written . . . tears apart all of society's prejudices about the academic abilities of the underprivileged. -New York Times
Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient--these are the stigmas that define America's educationally underprepared. Having grown up poor and been labeled this way, nationally acclaimed educator and author Mike Rose takes us into classrooms and communities to reveal what really lies behind the labels and test scores. With rich detail, Rose demonstrates innovative methods to initiate "problem" students into the world of language, literature, and written expression. This book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of a wide range of students.
Already a classic, Lives on the Boundary offers a truly democratic vision, one that should be heeded by anyone concerned with America's future.
A mirror to the many lacking perfect grammar and spelling who may see their dreams translated into reality after all. -Los Angeles Times Book Review
Vividly written . . . tears apart all of society's prejudices about the academic abilities of the underprivileged. -New York Times
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
50 people are currently reading
919 people want to read
About the author
Mike Rose
60 books26 followersMike Rose spent his career in public service, first as a city planner and eventually as a town manager. Mike’s fertile imagination and desire to be a writer started at an early age. Being from a family with an Irish Catholic background, Mike had his share of funny stories and wonderful characters. Add to that nearly 40 years of dealing with the public and elected officials, well, books practically write themselves.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
January 28, 2012
What happens to those in our society whose education has left them underprepared for the demands of modern life? In Lives on the Boundary, UCLA education professor Mike Rose adopts a unique approach in order to offer his answers to that question. Rather than adopting the conventional strategy of the education scholar -- weighty declarations of universal principles, defended in a footnote-heavy manner -- Rose tells his own story in order to lead the reader toward the conclusions Rose wants to draw. This unconventional approach gives the book a strong narrative edge and an engaging quality that encourages the reader to read on, in order to find out what's going to happen next.
As Rose tells it, his parents left the poverty of Southern Italy to seek opportunity in the United States -- first in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and then in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Los Angeles. There, Rose experienced firsthand what it means to live a life on the boundary. Enrolled in a Catholic school, Rose was mistakenly placed on the vocational track, where he found that the teachers ranged from prejudiced to incompetent to merely ineffectual, and where a typical student lament was "I just wanna be average." Rescued from this dead-end track by a faculty member's discovery of the mistake, Rose was exposed to some gifted educators who inspired him and helped him gain admission to Loyola University in Los Angeles. He thus escaped the cycle of poverty and despair that he saw overtaking many in his South L.A. neighborhood.
As he grappled with the question of what academic and career path to take, first at Loyola and then later in graduate school at UCLA -- English? Psychology? Education? -- Rose repeatedly found himself working with people who were educationally underprepared in the same way he had been. He worked for the Teacher Corps in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Monte; he tutored Vietnam veterans in a Veterans' Program; he assisted students at a Tutorial Center on UCLA's campus. In all cases, he saw how quickly and easily the existing educational system can define certain students -- the poor, minorities, veterans, people with disabilities -- as educational "failures," and how that definition can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 afterword to Rose's 1989 book updates the work to account for the impact of policies like the No Child Left Behind Act, a law that Rose finds to be seriously flawed.
What can be done to help the people who are living these "lives on the boundary"? Ultimately, Rose calls for a student-centered pedagogy, and for a renewed national commitment to a truly fair educational system. These proposed solutions set Rose in contrast to earlier education writers like Allan Bloom (who in The Closing of the American Mind called for a return to classical verities, with an expectation that modern American students must rise to a bar set by Plato and Aristotle) or E.D. Hirsch (who in Cultural Literacy provided an A-Z list of people, places, things, and ideas that he feels every American must know in order to be considered culturally literate). To my mind, Rose sets forth his case very persuasively. Read this book; and after you have read it, look back at your own education, and then forward toward the education of your children and their children. What conclusions do you find yourself drawing, and why?
As Rose tells it, his parents left the poverty of Southern Italy to seek opportunity in the United States -- first in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and then in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Los Angeles. There, Rose experienced firsthand what it means to live a life on the boundary. Enrolled in a Catholic school, Rose was mistakenly placed on the vocational track, where he found that the teachers ranged from prejudiced to incompetent to merely ineffectual, and where a typical student lament was "I just wanna be average." Rescued from this dead-end track by a faculty member's discovery of the mistake, Rose was exposed to some gifted educators who inspired him and helped him gain admission to Loyola University in Los Angeles. He thus escaped the cycle of poverty and despair that he saw overtaking many in his South L.A. neighborhood.
As he grappled with the question of what academic and career path to take, first at Loyola and then later in graduate school at UCLA -- English? Psychology? Education? -- Rose repeatedly found himself working with people who were educationally underprepared in the same way he had been. He worked for the Teacher Corps in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Monte; he tutored Vietnam veterans in a Veterans' Program; he assisted students at a Tutorial Center on UCLA's campus. In all cases, he saw how quickly and easily the existing educational system can define certain students -- the poor, minorities, veterans, people with disabilities -- as educational "failures," and how that definition can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 afterword to Rose's 1989 book updates the work to account for the impact of policies like the No Child Left Behind Act, a law that Rose finds to be seriously flawed.
What can be done to help the people who are living these "lives on the boundary"? Ultimately, Rose calls for a student-centered pedagogy, and for a renewed national commitment to a truly fair educational system. These proposed solutions set Rose in contrast to earlier education writers like Allan Bloom (who in The Closing of the American Mind called for a return to classical verities, with an expectation that modern American students must rise to a bar set by Plato and Aristotle) or E.D. Hirsch (who in Cultural Literacy provided an A-Z list of people, places, things, and ideas that he feels every American must know in order to be considered culturally literate). To my mind, Rose sets forth his case very persuasively. Read this book; and after you have read it, look back at your own education, and then forward toward the education of your children and their children. What conclusions do you find yourself drawing, and why?
January 4, 2017
I really enjoyed this book despite it being a bit of false advertising (in the title). The book does indeed explore, in moments, the struggles, achievements, and overall mental landscapes of under-prepared students in the US. However, it is more properly thought of as a memoir of Mike Rose whose life is inextricably entwined with educating students who do not immediately fit in to the US higher ed system. Rose's strong (but at times overwritten) prose makes his personal narrative mildly engaging, though I found the parts of the book where he analyzed the thinking of the students he was tutoring or teaching the most compelling parts of the book. Rose seems far more patient in trying to understand the minds of his pupils than so many of his colleagues in the academy, and parts of his narrative were indeed moving.
My favorite chapter was ch.7 "the Politics of Remediation," (which I would recommend as a standalone chapter for someone who wants to sample the book) which gives vivid examples of the gulf between how academics and academically under-prepared students typically approach academic texts and problem solving. For example, he included an interesting discussion of how a typical prefix /suffix identification task trades on confusing students who are trying to use "common sense" thinking. He shows that doing well on these tasks is more about mastering academic hoop jumping than acute critical thought. In many cases, once students are properly initiated to the nature of the game they are playing with such questions, they can get the right answers to these questions at a comparable rate to their better initiated peers. Alternatively, he provides an example of a student who cannot begin to decode Thomas Szasz's 'The Myth of Mental Illness' text she has been assigned in large part because she is having difficulty even entertaining the book's main hypothesis, that mental illness is a myth. The student got into psychology in order to help people like her brother who had suffered severely from mental illness, so the book's argument hit especially close to home. To take the argument seriously feels, to her, like a near betrayal of her very reasons for taking the class. Now it is, of course, a great thing for students to begin to learn to evaluate hypotheses very different from one's that they would be immediately inclined to accept, but in the academy professors are not often sensitive to just how challenging of a hurdle this can be to many students. Professors usually have fun toying with new ideas and puzzles (that is often what got them in the game in the first place), and are perplexed or even dismissive when students have difficulties with this. What is often needed for the student to begin considering the argument seriously is a bit more time and patience in explaining why it worth looking into these sorts of questions, rather than simply dismissing the students as close-minded or ignorant when they don't want to engage with the assigned texts in the class.
The book is long on thoughtful analysis of the higher ed system's failures to speak to under-prepared students and short on solutions, but this is fine with me (but prospective readers should be forewarned). The problem is a complex one (Rose did well enough in his explication that it still resonated with me even though it was first published in 1989) and many college faculty would do well to read just Ch.7 and be sensitive to how students are approaching the challenges that college typically presents. Overall, it was a fun and engaging read that will likely stick with me.
My favorite chapter was ch.7 "the Politics of Remediation," (which I would recommend as a standalone chapter for someone who wants to sample the book) which gives vivid examples of the gulf between how academics and academically under-prepared students typically approach academic texts and problem solving. For example, he included an interesting discussion of how a typical prefix /suffix identification task trades on confusing students who are trying to use "common sense" thinking. He shows that doing well on these tasks is more about mastering academic hoop jumping than acute critical thought. In many cases, once students are properly initiated to the nature of the game they are playing with such questions, they can get the right answers to these questions at a comparable rate to their better initiated peers. Alternatively, he provides an example of a student who cannot begin to decode Thomas Szasz's 'The Myth of Mental Illness' text she has been assigned in large part because she is having difficulty even entertaining the book's main hypothesis, that mental illness is a myth. The student got into psychology in order to help people like her brother who had suffered severely from mental illness, so the book's argument hit especially close to home. To take the argument seriously feels, to her, like a near betrayal of her very reasons for taking the class. Now it is, of course, a great thing for students to begin to learn to evaluate hypotheses very different from one's that they would be immediately inclined to accept, but in the academy professors are not often sensitive to just how challenging of a hurdle this can be to many students. Professors usually have fun toying with new ideas and puzzles (that is often what got them in the game in the first place), and are perplexed or even dismissive when students have difficulties with this. What is often needed for the student to begin considering the argument seriously is a bit more time and patience in explaining why it worth looking into these sorts of questions, rather than simply dismissing the students as close-minded or ignorant when they don't want to engage with the assigned texts in the class.
The book is long on thoughtful analysis of the higher ed system's failures to speak to under-prepared students and short on solutions, but this is fine with me (but prospective readers should be forewarned). The problem is a complex one (Rose did well enough in his explication that it still resonated with me even though it was first published in 1989) and many college faculty would do well to read just Ch.7 and be sensitive to how students are approaching the challenges that college typically presents. Overall, it was a fun and engaging read that will likely stick with me.
March 31, 2009
anyone who teaches should read this text. period. i read it for the first time during my undergrad.; again during MA work with Lisa Ede, and now I teach it in classes at U of Iowa.
February 9, 2022
I’m not entirely certain who this book is written for. It certainly isn’t the institutions, because this book neither addresses nor adequately condemns them. It cannot be professors or educators either, because why would they need to read 300 pages of struggles they are already familiar with? Ultimately I take issue with laying the blame of student struggles solely at educators feet and ignoring the institutions themselves. Educators cannot make a difference without support and resources, and while this book does a fair job of outlining these students’ struggles and lives, it does not offer a practical solution for anyone.
August 19, 2021
I read this book twice within a very short time period in the late 90s/early 2000. It meant a lot to me, was personally validating.
July 6, 2009
The three stars are not to indicate the mediocrity of the entire book, but merely an average composed of the scores I would give for the various chapters.
For example, the entire beginning of Lives is devoted to Mike Rose's backstory. And while his own story mirrors the lives of many of the students he later talks about, and is therefor relevant, it doesn't offer anything significantly different, especially in any way that demands three chapters.
Likewise, the end of the book veers into a lot of platitudes about pedagogy and the politics of education that, I imagine, were more revolutionary at the time of publication than they are now.
Where the book is amazing, however, is in the specific examples he has chosen to highlight from his experience as a teacher throughout the middle of this book. In these chapters, I felt I got some real advice on how to approach teaching. One thing shown again and again to me and that I know I will struggle to remember (which I MUST keep in mind to be a good teacher) is that poor performance does not equate with low intelligence. Time and again, Rose's examples demonstrated how the inequality in the education system sets disenfranchised students up to fail, and how with a little bit of analysis, such students can still learn to be better writers and to succeed in an academic environment. His patience and insight in these cases is inspirational and educational. Worth getting through the first three chapters for anyone interested in teaching.
For example, the entire beginning of Lives is devoted to Mike Rose's backstory. And while his own story mirrors the lives of many of the students he later talks about, and is therefor relevant, it doesn't offer anything significantly different, especially in any way that demands three chapters.
Likewise, the end of the book veers into a lot of platitudes about pedagogy and the politics of education that, I imagine, were more revolutionary at the time of publication than they are now.
Where the book is amazing, however, is in the specific examples he has chosen to highlight from his experience as a teacher throughout the middle of this book. In these chapters, I felt I got some real advice on how to approach teaching. One thing shown again and again to me and that I know I will struggle to remember (which I MUST keep in mind to be a good teacher) is that poor performance does not equate with low intelligence. Time and again, Rose's examples demonstrated how the inequality in the education system sets disenfranchised students up to fail, and how with a little bit of analysis, such students can still learn to be better writers and to succeed in an academic environment. His patience and insight in these cases is inspirational and educational. Worth getting through the first three chapters for anyone interested in teaching.
April 4, 2008
Favorite lines:
1. "Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing in pretty shallow water. . . . But mostly the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond."
2. "Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself."
3. "Kids labeled as marginal have a literate capacity far richer than the numbers in their folders reveal. We set out to determine what a child knows in order to tailor instruction, but we frequently slot rather than shape, categorize rather than foster. And the poorer the kids are-the less power their parents have-the more likely are their chances of being hurt about their intelligence."
4. "Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance. You didn't just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk. You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water. Maybe nothing was 'intrinsically interesting.' Knowledge gained its meaning, at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation. My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me."
1. "Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing in pretty shallow water. . . . But mostly the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond."
2. "Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself."
3. "Kids labeled as marginal have a literate capacity far richer than the numbers in their folders reveal. We set out to determine what a child knows in order to tailor instruction, but we frequently slot rather than shape, categorize rather than foster. And the poorer the kids are-the less power their parents have-the more likely are their chances of being hurt about their intelligence."
4. "Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance. You didn't just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk. You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water. Maybe nothing was 'intrinsically interesting.' Knowledge gained its meaning, at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation. My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me."
January 21, 2023
Written in the late 1980s, yet still so relevant to today--somehow educators still get stuck in the same traps and politicians love to rally their troops with the same tales of academic apocalypse.
It's a book I'd highly recommend to any educator. Though he doesn't argue for specific methods necessarily, Rose does critique the way the American education system views "underprepared" and disadvantaged students. He's particularly critical of "remedial" classes for good reason. And I think most importantly, through sharing his own experiences as a student and a teacher, he points to what's at the heart of education: an invitation to join a conversation.
It's a book I'd highly recommend to any educator. Though he doesn't argue for specific methods necessarily, Rose does critique the way the American education system views "underprepared" and disadvantaged students. He's particularly critical of "remedial" classes for good reason. And I think most importantly, through sharing his own experiences as a student and a teacher, he points to what's at the heart of education: an invitation to join a conversation.
July 10, 2018
The form of this deeply important analysis of the failures of American education for the dislocated, "remedial," and left behind is one if not thee aspect that makes this book sing. Anecdotes, clips of memoir, and serious reflection by Mike Rose assist in illuminating what we all need to consider when we talk about education. Wonderful read.
July 1, 2023
If you teach writing in any capacity, you need to read this book. I came to it after reading the oft-anthologized "I Just Wanna be Average" (note: the version in this collection is longer). As others have noted, the title can be somewhat misleading since the book takes a more memoiristic approach, but all in all, I enjoyed this.
July 4, 2024
Favorite Quotes:
"The more things change, the more they remain the same. IN 1841 the president of Brown complained that 'students frequently enter college almost wholly unacquainted with English grammar" (Rose 5). HA! Still true in 2024!
"...It is clear from the author's italics that the last sentence of the passage is important, so I underlined it...I was reading words but not understanding text. I was the human incarnation of language-recognition computer programs: able to record the dictionary meanings of individual words but unable to generate any meaning out of them" (Rose 50).
Re: learning to write at a college-level / college-level writing course work
"Appropriating a style and making it your own is difficult, and you'll miss the mark a thousand times along the way. The botched performances though, are part of it all, and developing writers will grown through them if they are able to write for people who care about language, people who are willing to sit with them and help them as they struggle to write about difficult things. That is what Ted Erlandson did for me" (Rose 54).
"I was easily frustrated, and it didn't' take a lot to make me doubt myself. When teachers would write 'no' or 'awkward' or 'rewrite' alongside the sentences I had worked so hard to produce, I would be peeved and disappointed. 'Well, what the hell *do* they want?' I'd grumble to no one in particular" (Rose 55).
"Nothing is more exclusive than the academic club: its language is highbrow, it has fancy badges, and it worships tradition. It limits itself to a few participants who prefer to talk to each other. What Father Albertson did was bring us inside the circle, nudging us out into the chatter, always just behind us, whispering to try this step, then this one, encouraging us to feel the moves for ourselves" (Rose 58).
"Writing and reading are such private acts that we forget how fundamentally social they are: We hear stories read by others and we like to tell others about the stories we read; we learn to write from others and we write for others to read us. The curriculum I saw drained the life out of all this, reduced literacy to the dry dismembering of language -- not alive, not communicative at all....This was a science of language...It was an exercise that was 'all analysis and no synthesis,' pursued for its own pedantic ends" (Rose 110).
"I was living through the very conflict I was cutting and pasting into my notebooks --the conflict between two visions: one of individual possibility and one of environmental limits and determiners" (Rose 114-15).
"...kids labeled as marginal have a literate capacity far richer than the numbers in their folders reveal. We set out to determine what a child knows in order to tailor instruction, but we frequently slot rather than shape, categorize rather than foster. And the poorer the kids are -- the less power their parents have -- the more likely are their chances of being...hurt about their intelligence" (Rose 128).
"But the more I come to understand about education, the more I've come to believe in the power of invitation" (Rose 132).
"My students needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as systematic inquirers. They had to be let into the academic club" (Rose 141).
"Every so often, people come together and create in places like the Extension Building a special kind of work. From the work, a few of the helpers and a few of those being helped emerge transformed. Then money dries up, new political agendas are drawn, the people leave, new ones cease to come. The programs fade. They're written up and filed away" (Rose 164).
"Mina Shaughnessy, an inspired teacher, used to point out that we won't understand the logic of the error unless we also understand the institutional expectations that students face and the way they interpret and internalize them....The more skilled the tutors got at listening and waiting, the better they got at catching the clue that would reveal what Shaughnessy was fond of calling the intelligence of the student's mistake" (Rose 172).
Re: high school students who are uber-compliant-hoop-jumpers who get "A's" in high school then go on to struggle in college: "...actually most of the freshmen who visited the Tutorial Center had high school records that were different from mine; they were not somnambulant and did not have spotty transcripts. They were the kids who held class offices and saw their names on the honor roll; they went out for sports and were involved in drama and music and a variety of civic and religious clubs. If they had trouble with mathematics or English or science, they could depend on the fairness of a system that rewarded effort and involvement: They participated in class discussions, got their work in on time, helped the teacher out, did extra-credit projects. In short, they were good academic citizens, and in some high schools...that was enough to assure them a B.* So, although some of them came to UCLA aware that math or English or science was hard for them, they figured they'd do ok if they put in the time, if they read the textbook carefully and did all their homework. They saw themselves as academic successes.
These were the first students I'd worked with who did not have histories of failure...[but] being encourage by counselors to sign up for tutorial support- was strange and unsettling. They simply had little experience of being on the academic fringe" (Rose 172).
*Compliance gets most high school students "A's" in a post-pandemic world, and GPA's are wildly inflated post 2020. So failure for college freshman is still a steady trend.
"All colleges have their killer courses, courses meant to screen students from science or engineering or those departments in arts and humanities that aren't desperate for enrollments...The course is difficult for lots of reasons, but the primary one is that it requires students not just to understand and remember individual facts, formulas, and operations but to use them to solve problems, to recognize what kind of problem a particular teaser is and to combine and recombine facts, formulas and operations to solve it....[a student failed the midterm because] It didn't require her to dump her memory. It gave her a short list of problems and asked her to solve them" (Rose 175).
Student says: "'I should have gotten better than a C-. I think I deserve way higher than that.' There it was. A brand. I said that I knew the grade was a disappointment, but if he'd stick with me he'd do better. He didn't say much more. He looked away. I had tacitly agreed with his teacher, so we were past discussing the paper: We were discussing his identity and his future. I work hard, he's really saying to me. I go to class. I read the book. I write the paper. Can't you see. I'm not a C-. Don't tell me I'm a C-. He was looking straight ahead past me at the wall. His hands were still on his legs" (Rose 177).
"Virtually all the writing academics do is built on the writing of others. Every argument proceeds from the text of others. Marita was only partially initiated to how this work: She was still unsure as to how to weave quotations in with her own prose, how to mark the difference, how to cite whom she used, how to strike the proper balance between her writing and someone else's -- how, in short, to position herself in an academic discussion" (Rose 180).
"I had to stand on the borders of a number of disciplines and study the way knowledge is structured in the academy and, as well, detail what it means to be unprepared to participate in that disciplinary structure" (Rose 187).
"Asked to produce something that is beyond them, writers might also fall back on strategies they already know. Asked to take a passage critically apart, they'll summarize it" (Rose 189).
"...the gatekeeper courses -- the courses that determine entrance to a major...are placed like land mines in the uneven terrain of the freshman year....The faculty, for the most part, do not provide freshmen with instruction on how to use knowledge creatively -- and then penalize them when they cannot do so" (Rose 191).
"Students need more opportunities to write about what they're learning and guidance in the techniques and conventions of that writing...They need opportunities to talk about what they're learning: to test their ideas, reveal their assumptions, talk through the places where new knowledge clashes with ingrained belief" (Rose 193-4).
"...in America there is the belief that 'to measure is to initiate a cure.' But a focus on quantification -- on errors we can count, on test scores we can rank-order -- can divert us from rather than guide us toward solutions. Numbers seduce us into thinking we know more than we do....What goes on behind the mistakes simply escapes the measurer's rule" (Rose 200).
"Through all my experiences with people struggling to learn, the one thing that strikes me most ins the ease with which we misperceive failing performance and the degree to which this misperception both reflects and reinforces the social order" (Rose 205).
"Philosophy, said Aristotle, begins in wonder. So does education" (Rose 223).
"A friend of mine recently suggested that education is one culture embracing another" (Rose 225).
"More often than we admit, a failed education is social more than intellectual in origin" (Rose 225).
"The books of the canon, claim the proposals, the Great Books, are a window onto a common core of experience and civic ideals" (Rose 234).
"What mattered most...were the relationships [teachers] established with me, the guidance they provided when I felt inadequate or threatened. This mentoring was part of my entry into that solemn library of Western thought -- and even with such support, there were still times of confusion, anger, and fear" (Rose 236).
"To understand the nature and development of literacy we need to consider the social context in which it occurs -- the political, economic, and cultural forces that encourage or inhibit it....The literacy curriculum is being asked to do what our politics and our economics have failed to do: diminish differences in achievement, narrow our gaps, bring us together" (Rose 237).
"The more things change, the more they remain the same. IN 1841 the president of Brown complained that 'students frequently enter college almost wholly unacquainted with English grammar" (Rose 5). HA! Still true in 2024!
"...It is clear from the author's italics that the last sentence of the passage is important, so I underlined it...I was reading words but not understanding text. I was the human incarnation of language-recognition computer programs: able to record the dictionary meanings of individual words but unable to generate any meaning out of them" (Rose 50).
Re: learning to write at a college-level / college-level writing course work
"Appropriating a style and making it your own is difficult, and you'll miss the mark a thousand times along the way. The botched performances though, are part of it all, and developing writers will grown through them if they are able to write for people who care about language, people who are willing to sit with them and help them as they struggle to write about difficult things. That is what Ted Erlandson did for me" (Rose 54).
"I was easily frustrated, and it didn't' take a lot to make me doubt myself. When teachers would write 'no' or 'awkward' or 'rewrite' alongside the sentences I had worked so hard to produce, I would be peeved and disappointed. 'Well, what the hell *do* they want?' I'd grumble to no one in particular" (Rose 55).
"Nothing is more exclusive than the academic club: its language is highbrow, it has fancy badges, and it worships tradition. It limits itself to a few participants who prefer to talk to each other. What Father Albertson did was bring us inside the circle, nudging us out into the chatter, always just behind us, whispering to try this step, then this one, encouraging us to feel the moves for ourselves" (Rose 58).
"Writing and reading are such private acts that we forget how fundamentally social they are: We hear stories read by others and we like to tell others about the stories we read; we learn to write from others and we write for others to read us. The curriculum I saw drained the life out of all this, reduced literacy to the dry dismembering of language -- not alive, not communicative at all....This was a science of language...It was an exercise that was 'all analysis and no synthesis,' pursued for its own pedantic ends" (Rose 110).
"I was living through the very conflict I was cutting and pasting into my notebooks --the conflict between two visions: one of individual possibility and one of environmental limits and determiners" (Rose 114-15).
"...kids labeled as marginal have a literate capacity far richer than the numbers in their folders reveal. We set out to determine what a child knows in order to tailor instruction, but we frequently slot rather than shape, categorize rather than foster. And the poorer the kids are -- the less power their parents have -- the more likely are their chances of being...hurt about their intelligence" (Rose 128).
"But the more I come to understand about education, the more I've come to believe in the power of invitation" (Rose 132).
"My students needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as systematic inquirers. They had to be let into the academic club" (Rose 141).
"Every so often, people come together and create in places like the Extension Building a special kind of work. From the work, a few of the helpers and a few of those being helped emerge transformed. Then money dries up, new political agendas are drawn, the people leave, new ones cease to come. The programs fade. They're written up and filed away" (Rose 164).
"Mina Shaughnessy, an inspired teacher, used to point out that we won't understand the logic of the error unless we also understand the institutional expectations that students face and the way they interpret and internalize them....The more skilled the tutors got at listening and waiting, the better they got at catching the clue that would reveal what Shaughnessy was fond of calling the intelligence of the student's mistake" (Rose 172).
Re: high school students who are uber-compliant-hoop-jumpers who get "A's" in high school then go on to struggle in college: "...actually most of the freshmen who visited the Tutorial Center had high school records that were different from mine; they were not somnambulant and did not have spotty transcripts. They were the kids who held class offices and saw their names on the honor roll; they went out for sports and were involved in drama and music and a variety of civic and religious clubs. If they had trouble with mathematics or English or science, they could depend on the fairness of a system that rewarded effort and involvement: They participated in class discussions, got their work in on time, helped the teacher out, did extra-credit projects. In short, they were good academic citizens, and in some high schools...that was enough to assure them a B.* So, although some of them came to UCLA aware that math or English or science was hard for them, they figured they'd do ok if they put in the time, if they read the textbook carefully and did all their homework. They saw themselves as academic successes.
These were the first students I'd worked with who did not have histories of failure...[but] being encourage by counselors to sign up for tutorial support- was strange and unsettling. They simply had little experience of being on the academic fringe" (Rose 172).
*Compliance gets most high school students "A's" in a post-pandemic world, and GPA's are wildly inflated post 2020. So failure for college freshman is still a steady trend.
"All colleges have their killer courses, courses meant to screen students from science or engineering or those departments in arts and humanities that aren't desperate for enrollments...The course is difficult for lots of reasons, but the primary one is that it requires students not just to understand and remember individual facts, formulas, and operations but to use them to solve problems, to recognize what kind of problem a particular teaser is and to combine and recombine facts, formulas and operations to solve it....[a student failed the midterm because] It didn't require her to dump her memory. It gave her a short list of problems and asked her to solve them" (Rose 175).
Student says: "'I should have gotten better than a C-. I think I deserve way higher than that.' There it was. A brand. I said that I knew the grade was a disappointment, but if he'd stick with me he'd do better. He didn't say much more. He looked away. I had tacitly agreed with his teacher, so we were past discussing the paper: We were discussing his identity and his future. I work hard, he's really saying to me. I go to class. I read the book. I write the paper. Can't you see. I'm not a C-. Don't tell me I'm a C-. He was looking straight ahead past me at the wall. His hands were still on his legs" (Rose 177).
"Virtually all the writing academics do is built on the writing of others. Every argument proceeds from the text of others. Marita was only partially initiated to how this work: She was still unsure as to how to weave quotations in with her own prose, how to mark the difference, how to cite whom she used, how to strike the proper balance between her writing and someone else's -- how, in short, to position herself in an academic discussion" (Rose 180).
"I had to stand on the borders of a number of disciplines and study the way knowledge is structured in the academy and, as well, detail what it means to be unprepared to participate in that disciplinary structure" (Rose 187).
"Asked to produce something that is beyond them, writers might also fall back on strategies they already know. Asked to take a passage critically apart, they'll summarize it" (Rose 189).
"...the gatekeeper courses -- the courses that determine entrance to a major...are placed like land mines in the uneven terrain of the freshman year....The faculty, for the most part, do not provide freshmen with instruction on how to use knowledge creatively -- and then penalize them when they cannot do so" (Rose 191).
"Students need more opportunities to write about what they're learning and guidance in the techniques and conventions of that writing...They need opportunities to talk about what they're learning: to test their ideas, reveal their assumptions, talk through the places where new knowledge clashes with ingrained belief" (Rose 193-4).
"...in America there is the belief that 'to measure is to initiate a cure.' But a focus on quantification -- on errors we can count, on test scores we can rank-order -- can divert us from rather than guide us toward solutions. Numbers seduce us into thinking we know more than we do....What goes on behind the mistakes simply escapes the measurer's rule" (Rose 200).
"Through all my experiences with people struggling to learn, the one thing that strikes me most ins the ease with which we misperceive failing performance and the degree to which this misperception both reflects and reinforces the social order" (Rose 205).
"Philosophy, said Aristotle, begins in wonder. So does education" (Rose 223).
"A friend of mine recently suggested that education is one culture embracing another" (Rose 225).
"More often than we admit, a failed education is social more than intellectual in origin" (Rose 225).
"The books of the canon, claim the proposals, the Great Books, are a window onto a common core of experience and civic ideals" (Rose 234).
"What mattered most...were the relationships [teachers] established with me, the guidance they provided when I felt inadequate or threatened. This mentoring was part of my entry into that solemn library of Western thought -- and even with such support, there were still times of confusion, anger, and fear" (Rose 236).
"To understand the nature and development of literacy we need to consider the social context in which it occurs -- the political, economic, and cultural forces that encourage or inhibit it....The literacy curriculum is being asked to do what our politics and our economics have failed to do: diminish differences in achievement, narrow our gaps, bring us together" (Rose 237).
March 18, 2019
Life may turn out quite differently, it seems, for those in our society whose education has left them -- for reasons relating to socioeconomic status, language, and/or culture -- underprepared for the demands of modern life. In Lives on the Boundary, UCLA education professor Mike Rose takes a unique approach to addressing this issue. Rather than adopting the conventional strategy of the education scholar -- weighty declarations of universal principles, defended in a footnote-heavy manner -- Rose tells his own story in order to lead the reader toward the conclusions Rose wants to draw. This unconventional approach gives the book a strong narrative edge and an engaging quality that encourages the reader to read on, in order to find out what's going to happen next.
As Rose tells it in this Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared (the book's subtitle), his parents left the poverty of Southern Italy to seek opportunity in the United States -- first in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and then in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Los Angeles. There, Rose experienced firsthand what it means to live a life on the boundary. Enrolled in a Catholic school, Rose was mistakenly placed on the vocational track, where he found that the teachers ranged from prejudiced to incompetent to merely ineffectual, and where a typical student lament was "I just wanna be average." Rescued from this dead-end track by a faculty member's discovery of the mistake, Rose was exposed to some gifted educators who inspired him and helped him gain admission to Loyola University in Los Angeles. He thus escaped the cycle of poverty and despair that he saw overtaking many in his South L.A. neighborhood.
As he grappled with the question of what academic and career path to take, first at Loyola and then later in graduate school at UCLA -- English? Psychology? Education? -- Rose repeatedly found himself working with people who were educationally underprepared in the same way he had been. He worked for the Teacher Corps in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Monte; he tutored Vietnam veterans in a Veterans' Program; he assisted students at a Tutorial Center on UCLA's campus. In all cases, he saw how quickly and easily the existing educational system can define certain students -- the poor, minorities, veterans, people with disabilities -- as educational "failures," and how that definition can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 afterword to Rose's 1989 book updates the work to account for the impact of policies like the No Child Left Behind Act, a law that Rose finds to be seriously flawed.
What can be done to help the people who are living these "lives on the boundary"? Ultimately, Rose calls for a student-centered pedagogy, and for a renewed national commitment to a truly fair educational system. These proposed solutions set Rose in contrast to earlier education writers like Allan Bloom (who in The Closing of the American Mind called for a return to classical verities, with an expectation that modern American students must rise to a bar set by Plato and Aristotle) or E.D. Hirsch (who in Cultural Literacy provided an A-Z list of people, places, things, and ideas that he feels every American must know in order to be considered culturally literate). To my mind, Rose sets forth his case very persuasively. Read this book; and after you have read it, look back at your own education, and then forward toward the education of your children and their children. What conclusions do you find yourself drawing, and why?
As Rose tells it in this Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared (the book's subtitle), his parents left the poverty of Southern Italy to seek opportunity in the United States -- first in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and then in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Los Angeles. There, Rose experienced firsthand what it means to live a life on the boundary. Enrolled in a Catholic school, Rose was mistakenly placed on the vocational track, where he found that the teachers ranged from prejudiced to incompetent to merely ineffectual, and where a typical student lament was "I just wanna be average." Rescued from this dead-end track by a faculty member's discovery of the mistake, Rose was exposed to some gifted educators who inspired him and helped him gain admission to Loyola University in Los Angeles. He thus escaped the cycle of poverty and despair that he saw overtaking many in his South L.A. neighborhood.
As he grappled with the question of what academic and career path to take, first at Loyola and then later in graduate school at UCLA -- English? Psychology? Education? -- Rose repeatedly found himself working with people who were educationally underprepared in the same way he had been. He worked for the Teacher Corps in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Monte; he tutored Vietnam veterans in a Veterans' Program; he assisted students at a Tutorial Center on UCLA's campus. In all cases, he saw how quickly and easily the existing educational system can define certain students -- the poor, minorities, veterans, people with disabilities -- as educational "failures," and how that definition can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 afterword to Rose's 1989 book updates the work to account for the impact of policies like the No Child Left Behind Act, a law that Rose finds to be seriously flawed.
What can be done to help the people who are living these "lives on the boundary"? Ultimately, Rose calls for a student-centered pedagogy, and for a renewed national commitment to a truly fair educational system. These proposed solutions set Rose in contrast to earlier education writers like Allan Bloom (who in The Closing of the American Mind called for a return to classical verities, with an expectation that modern American students must rise to a bar set by Plato and Aristotle) or E.D. Hirsch (who in Cultural Literacy provided an A-Z list of people, places, things, and ideas that he feels every American must know in order to be considered culturally literate). To my mind, Rose sets forth his case very persuasively. Read this book; and after you have read it, look back at your own education, and then forward toward the education of your children and their children. What conclusions do you find yourself drawing, and why?
December 2, 2014
What is literacy? It seems such a simple word, yet the view from the classroom is much different than from the person on the street. Mike Rose challenges our assumptions of reading and writing, of how a student is educationally introduced to both concepts, and how so many are being lost by the wayside of this much older "information highway."
The book is mostly autobiography as Rose describes how he was accidentally put into a remedial class due to a clerical error (shades of Brazil, anyone). The mistake went undetected for over a year, partly due to his parents' unfamiliarity with the school system and Rose's own attitude. He was lucky, though, when a teacher noticed a discrepancy between his standardized test scores and those of his incorrect file, and he was moved to the regular classroom. This early experience haunted him throughout his school career, however, and his struggle to enter into the "main- stream" of education becomes a mirror by which he views the process of becoming literate. His experience coupled with his volunteer work with underprepared children, veterans, and college students gives him fresh insight into the question that started this: what is literacy? Rose's experience is that no one sentence is sufficient to capture the idea, and that literacy is many things to many people.
Well, duh, you say, but stop and think about the "back to basics" arguments you hear from education reformers. What do they say about the process by which students learn to read and write? "All they need is work on the fundamentals," is a common theme. But Rose's challenge is that this is too simplistic. Based on his book, we can see that the grammar mistakes are easily correctable--the difficulty that people have with writing is often due to cultural or social differences rather than a difficulty in spelling a word correctly. This is not a popular stand; politicians hate this kind of idea because it takes something that they had a simple solution to and reveals it as a much more complex problem. It is much easier to say, "All they need to do is work on their ABCs" or "We don't need to mollycoddle these students. In my day, you learned the rules and that was that." Step back from the class, rethink what the purpose of literacy is, and then let's return to the problem. Literacy, especially functional literacy as defined by the government, is a moving target. During World War I, the government defined it as a fourth grade education. After World War II, it was an eighth grade education. So, if we say people are less literate today, are we saying the same thing, or has the bar moved? Is it necessary to be "more literate" today? And, if so, how does the phrase "more literate" compare to the idea that there is a standard by which literacy can be judged.
Rose doesn't have the answers, although his book does make a compelling case for more one-to-one contact between instructors and students. The harried nature of modern classrooms leave teachers with little extra time to find the cultural, social, or developmental problem that holds children from finding their literacy potential. I hate to sound like a democrat, but it frankly sounds like the true solution to the "literacy crises" might indeed be throwing more money at the schools rather than a "back to basics" approach; money to be used to supply more teachers to those students. Hell, it's got to be more useful than another B1 Bomber.
The book is mostly autobiography as Rose describes how he was accidentally put into a remedial class due to a clerical error (shades of Brazil, anyone). The mistake went undetected for over a year, partly due to his parents' unfamiliarity with the school system and Rose's own attitude. He was lucky, though, when a teacher noticed a discrepancy between his standardized test scores and those of his incorrect file, and he was moved to the regular classroom. This early experience haunted him throughout his school career, however, and his struggle to enter into the "main- stream" of education becomes a mirror by which he views the process of becoming literate. His experience coupled with his volunteer work with underprepared children, veterans, and college students gives him fresh insight into the question that started this: what is literacy? Rose's experience is that no one sentence is sufficient to capture the idea, and that literacy is many things to many people.
Well, duh, you say, but stop and think about the "back to basics" arguments you hear from education reformers. What do they say about the process by which students learn to read and write? "All they need is work on the fundamentals," is a common theme. But Rose's challenge is that this is too simplistic. Based on his book, we can see that the grammar mistakes are easily correctable--the difficulty that people have with writing is often due to cultural or social differences rather than a difficulty in spelling a word correctly. This is not a popular stand; politicians hate this kind of idea because it takes something that they had a simple solution to and reveals it as a much more complex problem. It is much easier to say, "All they need to do is work on their ABCs" or "We don't need to mollycoddle these students. In my day, you learned the rules and that was that." Step back from the class, rethink what the purpose of literacy is, and then let's return to the problem. Literacy, especially functional literacy as defined by the government, is a moving target. During World War I, the government defined it as a fourth grade education. After World War II, it was an eighth grade education. So, if we say people are less literate today, are we saying the same thing, or has the bar moved? Is it necessary to be "more literate" today? And, if so, how does the phrase "more literate" compare to the idea that there is a standard by which literacy can be judged.
Rose doesn't have the answers, although his book does make a compelling case for more one-to-one contact between instructors and students. The harried nature of modern classrooms leave teachers with little extra time to find the cultural, social, or developmental problem that holds children from finding their literacy potential. I hate to sound like a democrat, but it frankly sounds like the true solution to the "literacy crises" might indeed be throwing more money at the schools rather than a "back to basics" approach; money to be used to supply more teachers to those students. Hell, it's got to be more useful than another B1 Bomber.
June 4, 2010
In his literacy narrative Lives on the Boundary (1989), Mike Rose explores issues of class and educational disparity in regards to literacy. He explains the lack of excitement and engagement he experienced when he was in vocational school, and by chance, he found out he was supposed to be in college track. Once there, education was different and he found the excitement and (luckily) mentorship to push him to go to college. Rose's narrative helps him to question the meritocracy myth of "self-reliance and individualism" that is hard to reject as "nonsense" (47). Later, as a tutor, he found that there was "little room in [school's:] curriculum—unless the inventive teacher created it—to explore the real stuff of literacy: conveying something meaningful, communicating information, creating narratives, shaping what we see and feel and believe in written language" (109). Rose begins to understand education as the slow process of entering a discourse. He writes, "you could almost define a university education as an initiation into a variety of powerful ongoing discussions, an initiation that can occur only through the repeated use of new language in the company of others" (192).
Rose also questions the literacy crisis discourse, seeing it as blaming the victims and not really understanding why there is failed performance. Part of the reason for failed performance is an understanding of education as "efficiency" with "the strong desire of our society to maintain correct language use" (208), as well as the connotations of remedial education with mental defectiveness and disease (209). Rose also critiques standardized tests, which are meant to be obfuscating and unfamiliar (217); our ability to look for deficiency and miss what else is going on (222); and canonical education that is more like religion, valuing what should be learned instead of social and cognitive learning processes (235-236).
Rose also questions the literacy crisis discourse, seeing it as blaming the victims and not really understanding why there is failed performance. Part of the reason for failed performance is an understanding of education as "efficiency" with "the strong desire of our society to maintain correct language use" (208), as well as the connotations of remedial education with mental defectiveness and disease (209). Rose also critiques standardized tests, which are meant to be obfuscating and unfamiliar (217); our ability to look for deficiency and miss what else is going on (222); and canonical education that is more like religion, valuing what should be learned instead of social and cognitive learning processes (235-236).
March 2, 2009
'Lives' is an educator's book. Your reaction to it will depend on what point you are at in your career. If you are just getting started, it's an absolute "must read"--it lays out the human stories of those students who are "underprepared" or "unprepared" for college, and it uses these stories to point out some very solid issues underlying their struggle. It also has some great "how to" teaching moments.
It's doubly credible because Rose writes of himself--he was one of the 'underprepared,' and so he's writing as a member of the group, not as an outsider studying 'them.' This also gives him credibility with the other people he writes about. The most interesting thing, to me, is the sense of hopelessness that permeates these students lives--having met failure in so many places in their lives, higher education is one of those places where people expect to fail. It's a good reality check for people who have not had to struggle in their education.
If you are an experienced educator with any familiarity with the New Literacy studies, this book is a bit long in the tooth. Not that it's a bad book, but you probably won't learn anything new. I highly recommend the book to people just starting out as teachers or those who are working with underprepared students and who need practical "how tos" to help them.
It's doubly credible because Rose writes of himself--he was one of the 'underprepared,' and so he's writing as a member of the group, not as an outsider studying 'them.' This also gives him credibility with the other people he writes about. The most interesting thing, to me, is the sense of hopelessness that permeates these students lives--having met failure in so many places in their lives, higher education is one of those places where people expect to fail. It's a good reality check for people who have not had to struggle in their education.
If you are an experienced educator with any familiarity with the New Literacy studies, this book is a bit long in the tooth. Not that it's a bad book, but you probably won't learn anything new. I highly recommend the book to people just starting out as teachers or those who are working with underprepared students and who need practical "how tos" to help them.
September 7, 2009
One of the best books I've read (granted, I'm not an education professional) on the lost/postponed potential of a good portion of American youth who just don't happen to fit narrow definitions of academic ability. A child of Italian Immigrant parents living is South L.A., once labeled as "slow" and who later graduated from LMU with a background in English & poetry, Mike Rose wrote a book that is both poignant and at times vividly poetic. It is difficult in today's climate to shut out the constant barrage of bad news about bad test scores, the "dumbing down" of American youth, and the general descent of American society into drooling idiocy. Rose reminds us as we yearn for some glorious yesteryear when all students obeyed the teachers, everyone had perfect grammar and diction, and life was lovely that 1) the media has been announcing the decline of the American student since the 1860s and 2) that glorious yesteryear was as real as Camelot. He questions the reliance on tests as they are currently designed and administered to determine inherent cognitive ability, without critically examining the assumptions that testers and educators bring to the table about their students and how those assumptions (positive and negative) affect student performance. Suffice to say that this book should be required reading for anyone involved in education.
February 6, 2017
LISTEN, Y'ALL. This book should be required reading for everyone going into education. Mike Rose was able to put into words what I struggle to articulate about the students I have tutored at all levels in higher education. I am so impressed by the way that Rose's accounts are deeply political without preaching to his reader--through an incredible interweaving of student vignettes, personal experiences and the words of other scholars and mentors, he emphasizes the importance of writing being taught as communication regardless of a student's perceived ability. He acknowledges the faulty perception of error as indicative of lack of cognitive capacity, and points out the flawed logic of desiring more "literate" times in history (a time that never existed). I am grateful to have read this, and both discouraged and emboldened by the fact that so little has changed in education from the time he first published this book. There's work to be done, and this book has inspired me to, in my small corner of the world, do it.
January 24, 2015
Mike Rose is a strident voice in the effort to reorganize the structure of education to better represent students not part of the hegemonic majority. This book, though mostly autobiographical, is more approachable than some more heady books from the same theoretical genre. On some pages, even more, Rose's prose even touches upon the fringes of poetry: a no-man's land for Ivory Tower discourse, but welcome.
I subtract stars because I am less interested in Rose's personal life than his ideas; so perhaps this isn't the perfect book for me. Still, and especially toward the end, Rose makes specific condemnations about a) subservience to a reductive canon and b) a focus on socio-pollitcal-economic structures of marginalization rather than victim blaming the student for "failures," utilizing medical jargon to indicate sickness that stigmatizes the student for an academic lifetime.
Rose doesn't dig to the root of the problem, but he shovels in the right direction.
I subtract stars because I am less interested in Rose's personal life than his ideas; so perhaps this isn't the perfect book for me. Still, and especially toward the end, Rose makes specific condemnations about a) subservience to a reductive canon and b) a focus on socio-pollitcal-economic structures of marginalization rather than victim blaming the student for "failures," utilizing medical jargon to indicate sickness that stigmatizes the student for an academic lifetime.
Rose doesn't dig to the root of the problem, but he shovels in the right direction.
January 15, 2020
My first had-to-read-it-for-class book of the new semester, and thankfully, it was a good one. For anyone who works in education, nothing in this book will be new, or a surprise, but that doesn't mean it's not worth reading. This book is part autobiography, part memoir, part analysis of the US education system and those that struggle to succeed in it. Rose's personal narrative is one of remediation followed by academic success - proof that with the right interventions, hard work, and a bit of luck, those labelled "remedial" can succeed. But he's also quick squash the Hollywood narrative that some white savior teacher can head to a bad school and turn it all around for those students- rather, what it takes is one-on-one work with students and an understanding of the complex social, psychological and economic factors contributing to educational challenges.
January 2, 2009
Blending analysis and memoir (an accomplishment in itself), Mike Rose shows that people who have been shut out of education--called remedial or illiterate--have vast knowledge that the educational structure doesn't tap. By example, he shows that teachers should be open-minded about what their students can accomplish and willing to take the time to work with students on writing and show students how to "pick the academic lock" so that they have the thinking tools to join university dialogues instead of being isolated and overwhelmed by the conventions of the disciplines. He points out that even error shows learning, and teachers should look for what the errors teach them about their students. This book gives me new confidence and a refined mission for the classroom.
September 22, 2009
This is a terrific book. I love how Rose uses his own experiences as both a student and a teacher to discuss education in America. Rose's writing is accessible and entertaining--he has a knack for choosing the right stories to illustrate his points well--while still making a major contribution to the literature.
July 28, 2010
Lives on the Boundary is mostly a collection of character sketches (of Rose's teachers and of his students), some of which are sappy and stereotypical. Interspersed with those are really compelling and fantastic ideas about pedagogy and what education should mean to people and what it can do for people. A good read for any teacher.
September 15, 2020
While I loved the beginning of the book which delved into Rose's own education and the many hurdles placed on his way to higher education, I was disappointed to see that even when given an opportunity to write an afterword in 2005, the book was published in 1989, he turned down the chance to call the situation facing his "underprepared" or "remedial"students the victims of systemic racism.
December 10, 2008
Great book, especially if you want to discover how horrible America's Educational System REALLY is.....
March 20, 2009
What can I say? Mike Rose is a wonderful human being, writer, and scholar. This book is a must-read for all literacy educators. I will use it this summer in my Teaching Writing Course.
October 26, 2024
This is a very deep study on life, human development, and psychology among varied social and cultural traditions in America. For the less affluent, life provide few opportunities and many obstacles for escape and upward mobility. Rose describes his formative years as such. Poor grades in public school resulted in his being labeled as a slow learner, tracked into for remedial education and destined for dead-end jobs. He overcame the odds and progressed in life to being a highly accomplished educator. Throughout this process, his focus remained helping students of all ages and backgrounds escape the remedial label.
It is a well written narrative of one man’s search for meaning in life and service in public education. It began with the genre of English literature and a well thought out program of rigorous study at a parochial school in Los Angeles. I thought at first that this was going to be a retelling of “Limbo” (Lubrano), “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance), “Greenlights” (McConaughey) or even “Renaissance Man” (DeVito). While it incorporates many of the same environmental particulars as the other works, Rose moves on to a critique of public education in America and a formula for improving it.
Rose recognized that single tracking in English literature was not what he wanted to do and broadened his outlook. His interdisciplinary approach incorporated psychology, learning theory, individual tutoring, and cultural awareness to teaching about thinking writ large. He recognizes the constraints and struggles of adult learning. He leverages an operational approach to learning that captures the students’ thinking and figuring out how to get by in the real world. I have seen the same approach work for young recruits who were not well prepared academically for service but under the guidance of a patient NCO became fine soldiers. Rose’s similar concern for people doing well is admirable.
His most significant points are these:
• There remains a troubling lack of continuity between what students think they are going to study (moving toward a career path) and what they are actually taught.
• He says something very prophetic, which drives the post-modern, CRT-drunk, and woke folk bonkers, “American meritocracy is validated and sustained by the deep-rooted belief in equal opportunity.”
This book is well worth your time if only to cause you to think deeply about human development.
It is a well written narrative of one man’s search for meaning in life and service in public education. It began with the genre of English literature and a well thought out program of rigorous study at a parochial school in Los Angeles. I thought at first that this was going to be a retelling of “Limbo” (Lubrano), “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance), “Greenlights” (McConaughey) or even “Renaissance Man” (DeVito). While it incorporates many of the same environmental particulars as the other works, Rose moves on to a critique of public education in America and a formula for improving it.
Rose recognized that single tracking in English literature was not what he wanted to do and broadened his outlook. His interdisciplinary approach incorporated psychology, learning theory, individual tutoring, and cultural awareness to teaching about thinking writ large. He recognizes the constraints and struggles of adult learning. He leverages an operational approach to learning that captures the students’ thinking and figuring out how to get by in the real world. I have seen the same approach work for young recruits who were not well prepared academically for service but under the guidance of a patient NCO became fine soldiers. Rose’s similar concern for people doing well is admirable.
His most significant points are these:
• There remains a troubling lack of continuity between what students think they are going to study (moving toward a career path) and what they are actually taught.
• He says something very prophetic, which drives the post-modern, CRT-drunk, and woke folk bonkers, “American meritocracy is validated and sustained by the deep-rooted belief in equal opportunity.”
This book is well worth your time if only to cause you to think deeply about human development.
July 30, 2018
I had a feeling going into this it would resonate strongly with me as Rose's work has been cited by other scholars I know and admire. I loved every moment presented here. I enjoyed hearing about Rose's journey through undergrad and graduate education, but it's the stories and writing from the students he has worked with that really got my attention.
This is an essential read for all educators. Rose has a deep commitment to the students he works with, and he is able to draw out of them talents that may otherwise have remained hidden. He has worked with elementary school children, undergraduates, veterans, mature age students and more. In each setting he sets out to understand what makes each student tick and he guides their language and literacy development. He shares his thinking and reflections on his practice and there is much here than can be taken away. Nothing cookie cutter, but the approaches he uses and his educational philosophy inspire me to think more deeply about my own practice and my role. The focus on writing is also of particular interest for me.
Some quotes that stood out to me:
"This is the prose of America’s underclass. The writers are those who got lost in our schools, who could not escape neighborhoods that narrowed their possibilities, who could not enter the job market in any ascendant way. They are locked into unskilled and semiskilled jobs, live in places that threaten their children, suffer from disorders and handicaps they don’t have the money to treat. Some have been unemployed for a long time. But for all that, they remain hopeful, have somehow held onto a deep faith in education. They have come back to school.” (p. 215)
“We are in the middle of an extraordinary social experiment: the attempt to provide education for all members of a vast pluralistic democracy. To have any prayer of success, we’ll need many conceptual blessings: a philosophy of language and literacy that affirms the diverse sources of linguistic competence and deepens our understandings of the ways class and culture blind us to the richness of those sources.” (p. 238)
“At heart, we’ll need a guiding set of principles that do not encourage us to retreat from, but move us closer to, an understanding of the rich mix of speech and ritual and story that is America.” (p. 238)
This is an essential read for all educators. Rose has a deep commitment to the students he works with, and he is able to draw out of them talents that may otherwise have remained hidden. He has worked with elementary school children, undergraduates, veterans, mature age students and more. In each setting he sets out to understand what makes each student tick and he guides their language and literacy development. He shares his thinking and reflections on his practice and there is much here than can be taken away. Nothing cookie cutter, but the approaches he uses and his educational philosophy inspire me to think more deeply about my own practice and my role. The focus on writing is also of particular interest for me.
Some quotes that stood out to me:
"This is the prose of America’s underclass. The writers are those who got lost in our schools, who could not escape neighborhoods that narrowed their possibilities, who could not enter the job market in any ascendant way. They are locked into unskilled and semiskilled jobs, live in places that threaten their children, suffer from disorders and handicaps they don’t have the money to treat. Some have been unemployed for a long time. But for all that, they remain hopeful, have somehow held onto a deep faith in education. They have come back to school.” (p. 215)
“We are in the middle of an extraordinary social experiment: the attempt to provide education for all members of a vast pluralistic democracy. To have any prayer of success, we’ll need many conceptual blessings: a philosophy of language and literacy that affirms the diverse sources of linguistic competence and deepens our understandings of the ways class and culture blind us to the richness of those sources.” (p. 238)
“At heart, we’ll need a guiding set of principles that do not encourage us to retreat from, but move us closer to, an understanding of the rich mix of speech and ritual and story that is America.” (p. 238)
April 16, 2011
It took me some thought before I arrived at a ranking for this book: Portions of the text were thought provoking and encouraged me to rethink some of my teaching strategies; other portions caused me to wonder if the author had lost track of his title and the purpose of his book. The first four chapters of the book are a memoir of his life and recount his challenges as a young man in South Los Angeles and his struggles within a curriculum that seemed designed to prevent him from academic achievement. It wasn’t until I finally arrived at the end of the book that I understand why he did this: It is the way he “spark[s] further memories of [the reader’s] own schooling” and encourages them to “consider them, reflect on them, in some cases understand them in fresh ways” (244). While this is certainly a worthwhile and important goal, the title of the book lead me to believe that I would be reading about the educationally underprepared and provide me with strategies for coping with the challenges this group present in the classroom. As I read those first five chapters I wondered why Rose was spending so much time on himself, and when the “moving account of the struggles and achievements of America’s educationally unprepared” would begin; I understand that Rose considers himself a part of this group, but his reports later in the book are at best episodic when compared with the amount of time he devotes to telling his personal story.
There are eight chapters and an epilogue in the text and Rose spends five of those chapters discussing his academic career and the meandering path he took on his way to figuring out what is wrong with the way literacy is taught in American schools. He talks about being ‘rescued’ while in high school by teachers who saw his potential and used their influence to make sure he gained a college placement; his choice to earn a second bachelor degree in psychology; his decision to exit his master’s program so that he could pursue his interest in composition and how it is taught. He admits his mistakes along the way: He initially fails to understand that students arrive with prior knowledge that can be built upon, discovers that students who have been declared functionally illiterate by standardized tests are often fairly literate when dealing with daily tasks, and a system that labels students has catastrophic effects on their self-esteem that utterly inhibits their academic success. But all of this discussion is memoir followed by a collection of anecdotes—he explores a great many theories and challenges the political environment that surrounds this topic, but rarely offers specific strategies that might help address the issue.
In all honesty, even though this book is a little dated, the points he makes about grammar instruction taking precedence over composition are still valid; drill and skill instruction in “schoolbook grammar, mechanics, [and] usage…restrict[s] the scope of what language use [is] all about” (141). His argument is that the political environment demands that schools demonstrate measurable progress in their students, and the current “fill in the bubble” format of standardized tests 1) cripples students who aren’t able to understand the framework of the test and results in these students being categorized incorrectly as unintelligent and 2) require that teachers instruct on the bits and parts of speech instead of focusing on teaching students how to use language to effectively communicate. Rose acknowledges that these young people need to be literate to accomplish personal, academic, and professional goals but argues that the “curriculum in Developmental English breeds a deep social and intellectual isolation from print” which prevents students from “becoming fully, richly literate” (211). As he points out, “A traveler in a foreign land best learns names of people and places, how to express ideas, ways to carry on a conversation by moving around in the culture...What he must not do is hold back from the teeming flow of life, must not sit in his hotel room and drill himself on all possible gaffes before entering the streets. He'd never leave the room” (142). Before all else, students need to be using language in a real and meaningful way or grammar lessons have little meaning. His anecdotes are good illustrations of the complexity of problems teachers face in the classroom and reveal how teachers can be a large part of the problem due to a major oversight in higher education: Classroom-bound college graduates have not been taught to think about the “cognitive difficulties young people have as the learn how to conduct inquiry, […] the reading or writing difficulties that attend the development of philosophical reasoning” (196).
In my humble opinion, the greatest value this book has to offer is found in its analysis of an educational system that maintains teaching strategies long after they have outlived their usefulness. He shows how the educational system pits students against their teachers and each other in an unproductive downward spiral. As I’ve stated before, he doesn’t offer many suggestions for addressing these situations; he generally makes a claim and then uses an anecdote to illustrate his point, and this limits the overall usefulness beyond its value in teacher preparation. This book encourages the reader to “understand the nature and development of literacy” in the “social context” in which it occurs as well as how “political, economic, and cultural forces encourage or inhibit” literacy. He reminds educational professionals, as well as those who are interested in how people learn, that “no period” of American educational history has been “harmoniously stable” and the “invocation of a golden age” in which American students were doing better is a “mythologizing act” (228).
Despite my issues with this book, I would definitely recommend it to all teachers. Mike Rose doesn’t limit himself to pedagogical approaches in teaching language, suggesting that all teaching requires a student-centered approach and that chemistry and biology teachers have as much to learn from asking these questions as an English teacher. This book asks the reader to rethink the purpose of mass education in America, and if it is truly accomplishing this purpose or further alienating the poorest in our nation and further disadvantaging them. While I believe that institutions of higher learning and employers have the right to expect that the students they accept will have a basic education that allows them to function, I also believe that education should be designed to help individuals become critical, questioning beings. This is what Rose asks his reader to do: To think about education and its purpose, and to make decisions on where they stand philosophically before they engage their students.
There are eight chapters and an epilogue in the text and Rose spends five of those chapters discussing his academic career and the meandering path he took on his way to figuring out what is wrong with the way literacy is taught in American schools. He talks about being ‘rescued’ while in high school by teachers who saw his potential and used their influence to make sure he gained a college placement; his choice to earn a second bachelor degree in psychology; his decision to exit his master’s program so that he could pursue his interest in composition and how it is taught. He admits his mistakes along the way: He initially fails to understand that students arrive with prior knowledge that can be built upon, discovers that students who have been declared functionally illiterate by standardized tests are often fairly literate when dealing with daily tasks, and a system that labels students has catastrophic effects on their self-esteem that utterly inhibits their academic success. But all of this discussion is memoir followed by a collection of anecdotes—he explores a great many theories and challenges the political environment that surrounds this topic, but rarely offers specific strategies that might help address the issue.
In all honesty, even though this book is a little dated, the points he makes about grammar instruction taking precedence over composition are still valid; drill and skill instruction in “schoolbook grammar, mechanics, [and] usage…restrict[s] the scope of what language use [is] all about” (141). His argument is that the political environment demands that schools demonstrate measurable progress in their students, and the current “fill in the bubble” format of standardized tests 1) cripples students who aren’t able to understand the framework of the test and results in these students being categorized incorrectly as unintelligent and 2) require that teachers instruct on the bits and parts of speech instead of focusing on teaching students how to use language to effectively communicate. Rose acknowledges that these young people need to be literate to accomplish personal, academic, and professional goals but argues that the “curriculum in Developmental English breeds a deep social and intellectual isolation from print” which prevents students from “becoming fully, richly literate” (211). As he points out, “A traveler in a foreign land best learns names of people and places, how to express ideas, ways to carry on a conversation by moving around in the culture...What he must not do is hold back from the teeming flow of life, must not sit in his hotel room and drill himself on all possible gaffes before entering the streets. He'd never leave the room” (142). Before all else, students need to be using language in a real and meaningful way or grammar lessons have little meaning. His anecdotes are good illustrations of the complexity of problems teachers face in the classroom and reveal how teachers can be a large part of the problem due to a major oversight in higher education: Classroom-bound college graduates have not been taught to think about the “cognitive difficulties young people have as the learn how to conduct inquiry, […] the reading or writing difficulties that attend the development of philosophical reasoning” (196).
In my humble opinion, the greatest value this book has to offer is found in its analysis of an educational system that maintains teaching strategies long after they have outlived their usefulness. He shows how the educational system pits students against their teachers and each other in an unproductive downward spiral. As I’ve stated before, he doesn’t offer many suggestions for addressing these situations; he generally makes a claim and then uses an anecdote to illustrate his point, and this limits the overall usefulness beyond its value in teacher preparation. This book encourages the reader to “understand the nature and development of literacy” in the “social context” in which it occurs as well as how “political, economic, and cultural forces encourage or inhibit” literacy. He reminds educational professionals, as well as those who are interested in how people learn, that “no period” of American educational history has been “harmoniously stable” and the “invocation of a golden age” in which American students were doing better is a “mythologizing act” (228).
Despite my issues with this book, I would definitely recommend it to all teachers. Mike Rose doesn’t limit himself to pedagogical approaches in teaching language, suggesting that all teaching requires a student-centered approach and that chemistry and biology teachers have as much to learn from asking these questions as an English teacher. This book asks the reader to rethink the purpose of mass education in America, and if it is truly accomplishing this purpose or further alienating the poorest in our nation and further disadvantaging them. While I believe that institutions of higher learning and employers have the right to expect that the students they accept will have a basic education that allows them to function, I also believe that education should be designed to help individuals become critical, questioning beings. This is what Rose asks his reader to do: To think about education and its purpose, and to make decisions on where they stand philosophically before they engage their students.
December 30, 2019
In composing this hybrid text—part memoir, part social commentary, part scholarly analysis of American education—Mike Rose achieves something that eludes most intellectual writers. He writes with humanity about the humanities.
His technique genuinely exemplifies the power of storytelling. Through telling the tale of his own education and the challenges he endured to grow from a working class kid raised in Pennsylvania and Los Angeles to become a highly respected scholar/educator at UCLA, Rose demonstrates the contradictions within American culture that make success such an elusive goal for the less privileged.
He weaves together with his own story the stories of many students and colleagues he has encountered on his journey through educational institutions. His sensitive and poetic prose imbues those stories with an immediacy and a poignancy rarely found in scholarly discourse.
Perhaps most arresting is the reality that many of the issues that plagued the educational system in America at the time Rose wrote this (it was originally published in 1989) remain with us—and in many cases have grown worse.
Highly recommended.
His technique genuinely exemplifies the power of storytelling. Through telling the tale of his own education and the challenges he endured to grow from a working class kid raised in Pennsylvania and Los Angeles to become a highly respected scholar/educator at UCLA, Rose demonstrates the contradictions within American culture that make success such an elusive goal for the less privileged.
He weaves together with his own story the stories of many students and colleagues he has encountered on his journey through educational institutions. His sensitive and poetic prose imbues those stories with an immediacy and a poignancy rarely found in scholarly discourse.
Perhaps most arresting is the reality that many of the issues that plagued the educational system in America at the time Rose wrote this (it was originally published in 1989) remain with us—and in many cases have grown worse.
Highly recommended.
October 14, 2018
This book, man. The thrust of it is so good—that marginalized students are victims of a system designed to privilege some over others, but GODDAMN. I mean, the whole argument gets bogged down in Rose’s anecdata, and he doesn’t take his own point that language is exclusionary. He lambasts professors’ commitment to academic-ese while leaning on the same dense prose to prove his point. At many times, the writing itself feels pulled between Rose’s figuring of himself as a poet and his need to prove the validity of his academic thought (and his Ed.D). The afterword is the clearest and most valuable part of the book, and it earns this read an extra star from me. But man, I don’t know, you guys.
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