Photo by Alexandre Laurin
Rita, a student of mine, came to my office last week to discuss an upcoming paper. “How’s your research going?” I asked.
“I am a bad writer,” she said.
At the start of the semester, Rita wrote an essay describing the shame she felt whenever she sat down at the computer. Sentences conspired to reinforce her feelings of inadequacy. When she asked people to help her, they labeled her a “bad writer.”
Rita spoke Spanish with nearly everyone she cared about, yet the page made her push her fluidly-dancing ideas into the boring English sentences she knew were the “right” structure. When she wrote informal assignments – letters to a friend in the class – she created scenes where life “got out of control like a car in the snow” and a drunken man’s expression changed like “flipping channels on the television.”
I don’t know what you’re thinking at this point, but this sounds like an excellent writer to me.
This is why Mike Rose matters so much to me. Rose, an award-winning author and professor at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, argues that people who have been shut out of education or labeled as remedial have vast knowledge that educational structures don’t tap. He urges educators to value thought processes that academia typically does not embrace, and to see that even error reveals learning.
Coming from a blue-collar background, Rose esteems the intelligence that he saw growing up. On his blog, Rose says:
I am troubled by the way we as a society readily acknowledge the intelligence required for white-collar and professional occupations, but rarely honor the thinking involved in physical work.
His mother, a lifelong waitress, saw restaurants as “laborator(ies) of human relations.” Anyone who has been a server can concur that waiting tables means reading social cues from other workers and customers while keeping your own emotions in check. This combination of perceptiveness and self-regulation is literally called emotional labor. “There isn’t a day that goes by in the restaurant,” Rose’s mother always said, “that you don’t learn something.”
Since Rose values the intelligence needed in work dubbed non-intellectual, he argues for the potential of students who struggle in higher education.
In his classic, Lives on the Boundary, he describes his own education in south Los Angeles, where the school switched his files with another kid named Rose, and sent him to the lowest-level classes for his first two years of high school. His biology teacher discovered the error, and from then on, teachers pushed him at every step of the way: a teacher who had “found a little school” in south L.A. and wanted to “teach his heart out,” a professor who invented classes just so Rose and his friends could “read and write a lot under the close supervision of a faculty member,” professors who gave him “a directory of key names and notions” in their disciplines. Teachers carried heavier loads just so one or two students could succeed.
Rose reflects:
We live, in America, with so many platitudes about motivation and self-reliance and individualism – and myths spun from them, like those of Horatio Alger – that we find it hard to accept the fact that they are serious nonsense.
Living in south L.A. or Chicago’s south side or “any one of hundreds of other depressed communities,” he says, will require “support and guidance at many, many points along the way.”
But Rose also mentions that many kids from depressed communities have learned to “daydream . . . to avoid inadequacy” or to “reject the confusion and frustration [of grasping complex ideas] by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe.”
This makes me think motivation has to be part of achievement, too. Sometimes a teacher catches students when they are still openly motivated. When I asked Rita if she’d like a tutor, she said, “Yes! I want to get better!” But sometimes the right chemistry of individual motivation and teacher prodding isn’t there yet; or, maybe when I’ve been at it longer, I’ll learn to recognize it better.
For Rose, the alchemy was there when it needed to be, and if this much was given to him, he knew he would need to teach his heart out, too. In Lives on the Boundary, a gripping blend of memoir and analysis, he explains how he began to cultivate a love of language in his students, and also began to teach students how to “pick the academic lock.” Teaching veterans who had just returned from the service, he realized that so-called good students have certain ways of thinking and articulating, while other students become marginalized because they haven’t learned basic tools of academic thought: summarizing, classifying, comparing and analyzing. He designed his course for the veterans around these tools of thought.
Later, tutoring at UCLA, he discovered that error reveals learning. He tutored a woman named Suzette who kept writing in fragments because she wanted to vary her sentences. She didn’t want to keep starting sentences with “‘She . . . she . . . she . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . ” she said, “It doesn’t sound very intelligent.” Suzette was not making grammatical blunders – at least, not just – she was trying to find a more intellectual voice.
Rose’s pedagogy urges what I’ve been hearing again and again as I’ve taught a sophomore ethics course this semester – valuing the other. For Rose, it means valuing a student’s individuality. It means holding the carefully-planned assignment a little more loosely when a student offers an idea that lets her build on her knowledge. It means seeing error as an opportunity for progress. It means understanding the gaps in a student’s academic repertoire and figuring out how his experience, or some extra teaching, can fill those gaps.
Mike Rose expresses an ethic of care, directly wanting the good of “the other,” and as a model of this ethic, Rose is an exemplar for more than just teachers. Anyone who seeks to understand another person’s needs could use Rose as a model, particularly in their day-to-day vocation.
Teaching one’s heart out is just one way of living life to the fullest, breaking through a self-centered outlook, and living a life that centers on other people’s needs.
Quotations are from:
Rose, Mike. “The Intelligence of a Waitress in Motion.” Weblog post. Mike Rose’s Blog. 22 Aug 2008. <http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/search/label/work%20and%20intelligence>
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. 1989. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Chicago Education intelligence literacy Los Angeles Mike Rose restaurant work writing