Complete Study Guide: Mike Rose's 'I Just Wanna Be Average'
Academic Background and Overview of Mike Rose
Scholarly Profile and Achievements:
Published poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and two widely praised books on education in America.
Served as a professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles).
Born in .
Recipient of major awards from prestigious organizations, including the National Academy of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Major Educational Publications:
Lives on the Boundary (): An exploration of America's educationally underprivileged, from which this autobiographical narrative is selected.
Possible Lives (): Features a nationwide tour of creative classrooms and innovative educational programs.
Core Critique of American School Systems:
Demonstrates that students whom the system has written off possess tremendous unrealized potential.
Specifies systemic causes for the "failure" of students who navigate high school feeling belligerent, fearful, stoned, frustrated, or bored due to underprepared teachers, uninspiring curricula, and institutional misplacement.
Commute to Our Lady of Mercy High School
Transit Route and Neighborhood Context:
Commute required taking two city buses to reach Our Lady of Mercy High School.
The first bus started deep in South Los Angeles and picked up passengers at the midpoint.
The second bus passed through affluent neighborhoods featuring trees, parks, expansive lawns, and abundant flowers.
Bus Companions from South Los Angeles:
A group of South L.A. veterans shared the back of the bus, sent by parents who believed better educational opportunities existed in the west end of Los Angeles County.
Christy Biggars: A sixteen-year-old dealing drugs and rumored to be a pimp.
Bill Cobb and Johnny Gonzales: Grease-pencil artists extraodinaire who left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of "Cobb" and "Johnny" on the corrugated walls of the bus. (Nembutal is the trade name for pentobarbital, a sedative drug).
Tyrrell Wilson: Described as the coolest kid on the bus, who ran "the dozens" (a verbal competition of African origin where participants compete to top each other's insults) like a metric halfback, outrhymed, and outpointed Cobb.
Musical atmosphere: Cobb brought a radio onto the bus, providing a soundtrack featuring Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, The Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe's track about an awful mother-in-law "sent from down below."
Placement in the Vocational Track and Institutional Errors
Testing Error and Academic Tracking:
Entrance to Our Lady of Mercy required forms, releases, and placement assessments, primarily utilizing the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
Test results were mistakenly confused with those of another student named Rose who performed poorly.
As a direct result of this confusion, placement was made in the vocational education track ("Voc. Ed."), a euphemism for the bottom academic level.
Placed in dead-end classes including Business Math, Typing, and English–Level D for two full years without detection.
Disconnect Between School and Working-Class Parents:
Neither the student nor his parents recognized that vocational track courses led to academic dead ends.
Father Tommy Rose had only two years of schooling in Italy and lacked the institutional knowledge required to question school assignments.
Mother worked as an exhausted waitress and lacked the time, energy, or standing to challenge administrative decisions.
Teachers and Environment in Vocational Education
Freshman Homeroom and English: Brother Dill
Described as a deeply troubled and unstable instructor.
Frequently lost control of the classroom, voiced paranoid accusations, and engaged in physical violence (shaking or smacking students).
Within two months of the semester, Brother Dill delivered a face-turning slap that sent glasses sliding down the classroom aisle.
Physical Education: Ex-Lineman
Taught by a stubby former offensive lineman who played old-time professional football in the Midwest.
Routinely forced students to grab their ankles to receive a stinging wooden paddle across their buttocks to "make men of us."
Initial interaction with students:
Instructor: "'Rose'? What the hell kind of name is that?"
Student: "Italian, sir."
Instructor: "Italian! Ho. Rose, do you know the sound a bag of shit makes when it hits the wall?"
Student: "No, sir."
Instructor: "Wop!" (a derogatory slur for an Italian person).
Sophomore English: Mr. Mitropetros
A large, bejeweled man whose primary night job was managing the parking lot at the Shrine Auditorium.
Spent class periods crowing and preening about celebrities he encountered at work, which students encouraged with disingenuous questions and snickers.
Possessed minimal training in English; his sole lesson plan consisted of having students read the district's required text, Julius Caesar, aloud for the entire semester.
Finished the play well before the -week semester ended, forcing students to swap roles and restart the play repeatedly:
Dave Snyder (the fastest runner at Mercy) played Caesar.
Steve Fusco (a surfer who owned an envied paneled wagon) interpreted Calpurnia with breathless squeals.
By week , Snyder, Fusco, and others took on new roles, delivering water-logged renditions of Cassius and Brutus.
Sophomore Spanish I: Mr. Hector Montez
A new recruit who was tiny, soft-spoken, delicate, and measured at most tall.
Wholly unprepared for a turbulent classroom ("as prepared for it as a doily maker at a hammer throw").
Classroom Demographics: A dangerous mix combining South L.A. Black students, South Bay surfers, Slays, and Chicanos from the harbors of San Pedro ("surfers and hodads and South-Central blacks").
Classroom Dynamics: Steve Fusco propelled spitballs while Mike Dweetz taunted Billy Hawk, a reed-thin, quietly explosive student of half-Indian and half-Spanish descent.
Classroom Escalation: Billy Hawk struck out and hit Dweetz across the neck. Dweetz scattered desks, struck Billy behind the eye, and triggered a fight broken up by Snyder and Fusco, permanently destroying Montez's fragile authority.
Critical Analysis of Vocational Tracks and Student Adaptation
Theoretical Reality vs. Administrative Intent:
Educational maxim: "Students will float to the mark you set."
Vocational education claims to expand economic opportunities but functions primarily as a dumping ground for disaffected students failing in the school system.
Exceptional vocational education programs (such as Mr. Gross's classroom described in Theodore Sizer's Horace's Compromise) teach students to formulate hypotheses, troubleshoot, reason through problems, and communicate effectively.
At Our Lady of Mercy, most teachers failed to engage student imaginations, with rare exceptions like young Brother Slattery, who used a stern voice and weekly quizzes to teach world history.
Cognitive and Psychological Impacts of Remediation:
Remedial tracking fosters flawed problem-solving strategies and habits of defensive tuning out developed in elementary school.
Promotes mediocre academic performance and somnambulant problem-solving, leading students to detest core subjects like Shakespeare and history.
Profiles of Vocational Track Classmates:
Dave Snyder:
Accomplished sprinter and halfback possessing natural appeal, quick wit, and independence.
Indifferent to academic studies and enjoyed acting the fool, but maintained maturity and avoided trouble with faculty.
Sat behind Rose due to alphabetical seating (Latin alphabet order without intermediate R and S surnames), leading to their close friendship.
Ted Richard:
Seasoned street fighter and former Little League pitcher with a chunky build and baby face.
Characterized by a loud laugh, but signaled extreme physical danger when angry by raising the corner of his mouth by a quarter of an inch ().
Frequently initiated philosophical discussions ("What is courage? Does God exist?") and incorporated advanced vocabulary (salubrious, equivocal) into speech.
Non-academic reading sources: Argosy, Field and Stream, bus stop newspapers (Daily Worker to pornography), Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and conversations with uncles, hobos, or businessmen.
Represented a rough-hewn intellectual blending learned and apocryphal sources.
Ken Harvey:
A hodad (non-surfer) and car enthusiast with an oily ducktail hairstyle and puffy appearance.
When asked for his opinion on achievement during a religion class discussion on the parable of the talents, stated with minimal affect: "I just wanna be average."
Psychological Defense Mechanisms of Tracked Students:
Ken Harvey's statement represents a defense mechanism against high school disorientation.
High school forces working-class students to encounter dissonant ideas, diverse ethnic/linguistic groups, and elite curricula (French, physics, trigonometry) where privileged peers excel.
When labeled as "slow" and placed in curricula designed to occupy or train for unesteemed labor, students protect self-worth by enthusiastically embracing the vocational identity.
Students reject academic standards, define themselves as the "Common Joe," champion average performance, and adopt a philosophy of "Fuck this bullshit."
Maintenance of this defense requires students to shut down intellectually, cultivate stupidity, use sarcasm, keep vocabulary simple, act stoned, and convert boredom into a primary way of confronting the world.
Transition to College Prep and Quantitative Struggles
Sophomore Biology and Brother Clint:
Sophomore Biology was mandatory across all tracks (vocational to college prep) and taught by Brother Clint.
Brother Clint was young, physically imposing, and handsome; maintained absolute classroom control.
Utilized text overlay diagrams peeling back skin, veins, muscle, organs, and bones mapped to a hanging human skeleton.
Exam Cheating System between Rose and Dave Snyder:
Snyder poked Rose's back to request answers: , , , .
Test items transferred via code: cytoplasm (), methane (), William Harvey (), islets of Langerhans ().
Re-Tracking to College Prep:
Brother Clint noted consistent test scores of and achieved by a vocational student, reviewed academic files, and uncovered the initial testing error.
Recommended transfer to the College Prep track for junior year, a move statistically considered virtually impossible in secondary education.
Academic Hardships in College Prep Track:
Transition presented challenges: lack of academic discipline, poor study habits, and severe mathematical deficits.
Second-Year Algebra and Chemistry were taught by the athletic director (a priest); membership on the track team protected grades at a C level.
Civics was taught by a football coach who struggled to read textbook passages aloud; U.S. History was taught adequately.
The Psychology of Remedial Mathematics Frustration:
Re-encountering fundamental mathematical operations (simplifying algebraic fractions, multiplying square root expressions, setting up distance/shadow word problems) causes deep cognitive distress.
Leads to attention wavering, daydreaming, crumpled paper, embarrassment, anger, and internalizing failure as an organic flaw ("That part of my brain just doesn't work").
Family Crisis and Father's Illness
Progression of Tommy Rose's Arteriosclerosis:
Severe arteriosclerosis prevented a minor shin nick from healing, causing an ulcerating wound to widen.
Daily wound dressing changes performed by Lou Minton.
The family rented an oscillating bed placed in the front room to force blood circulation, but the condition degraded.
Doctors amputated the leg (repeating a family tragedy; Rose's grandfather had previously lost a leg in a stockyard accident).
Convalescence, Decline, and Death:
Convalesced at the Santa Monica Rehabilitation Center near the Pacific Ocean, learning to walk with an artificial leg.
Slipped and broke his hip after one year, forcing permanent confinement to a wheelchair.
Suffered a debilitating stroke late in Rose's junior year, fell into a coma, and died.
Appears in recurring dreams: either sad and grisly (lying in a bed soaked with suppuration) or healthy and strong.
Mentorship of Jack MacFarland and Academic Awakening
Profile and Teaching Style of Jack MacFarland:
Joined Our Lady of Mercy during Rose's senior year to teach five sections of senior English.
Earned a Master's degree from Columbia University at age ; taught in private schools because he refused to take teacher credentialing courses.
Adopted a beatnik appearance: stained teeth, tie tucked between the third and fourth shirt buttons, and chronically wrinkled pants.
Rigorous Curriculum and Pedagogy:
Introduced a prep school curriculum: assigned to essays per month, a book every to weeks (from Homer's Iliad to Ernest Hemingway), and reading quizzes every other day.
Paced the room jiggling chalk in his cupped hand while scribbling names of writers, philosophers, plays, and novels on the board.
Systematically taught Western intellectual history: Greek philosophy, Dante, Elizabethan worldview, Age of Reason, and existentialism.
Textbooks and Exercises: Used John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean?; required stylistic imitations of Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and Time magazine.
Maintained discipline through sharp intellectual wit (e.g., managing hungover Jim Fitzsimmons, alongside toothless football player Skip Madison who flicked his tongue saying "good chop").
Transformation of Student Behavior and Identity:
Controlled notorious vocational troublemakers (Mike Dweetz, Steve Fusco, Jim Fitzsimmons); Fitzsimmons read Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Rose resumed intense reading, tackling Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness while watching television wrestler Danny McShane execute the atomic drop on Mr. Moto.
MacFarland established a "literacy club" (adopting Frank Smith's term) that granted entry into intellectual life.
Extrinsic validation: Circled red B-pluses and A-minuses served as objective, public redefinitions of intellectual ability.
College Admissions and the Fledgling Literati
College Application Process and Intervention:
In December of senior year, MacFarland inquired about college plans.
Family background: No family member had attended college; only two uncles completed high school.
Rose initially planned to work a night job and attend local junior college to play sports with Dave Snyder.
MacFarland stated: "Listen, you can write."
Despite low transcript marks (A's in biology, B's in English/social science, C's or lower elsewhere) and rejections from USC and UCLA, MacFarland intervened.
MacFarland contacted his alma mater, Loyola University, spoke with admissions, wrote a recommendation letter, and secured Rose's admission as a probationary student with a financial loan.
The Senior Elective and Literary Salon:
MacFarland created an advanced senior English elective, forming a group of student intellectuals:
Art Mitz: Editor of the school newspaper.
Mark Dever: A quiet student who wrote beautifully (and died before age ).
Mike Rose.
Visits to MacFarland's Apartment:
Located near the airport in a "dingbat" architectural style building.
Cluttered living space: stacks of books, cigarette ashes in coffee saucers, German newspapers under the kitchen sink, and brick-and-board shelves loaded with notes and magazines.
Comprehensive Reading and Cultural Inventory:
Nikolai Gogol, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Djuna Barnes, Jackson Pollock, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre's Troubled Sleep, Man Ray, Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, Richard Wright, Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art, William Butler Yeats, Marguerite Duras, Herman Melville's Redburn, Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, Karl Marx's Kapital.
Alain-Fournier's The Wanderer (featuring an Edward Gorey cover illustration).
Franz Kafka's Amerika (featuring hero Karl Rossmann traveling to the Nature Theater of Oklahoma).
Excursions and Intellectual Identity:
Purchased stogies and visited The Cinema (L.A.'s premier art theater on Hollywood Boulevard) and Cherokee Bookstore in Hollywood.
Drank bourbon and coffee while trying out vocabulary associated with thinkers like Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard.
Acquired a language framework that provided a critical perspective on society, allowing Rose to move beyond the geographical limits of South Vermont.
Textual Analysis and Discussion Prompts
Questions for Engaging the Text:
Description of Rose's experiences in Voc. Ed., teacher characteristics, and personal encounters with similar educators.
Cognitive, emotional, and social impacts of vocational tracking on students, and specific underlying causes of mathematics failure.
Analysis of high school disorientation for students like Ken Harvey, evaluation of his response ("I just wanna be average"), and examination of student coping mechanisms.
Specific educational elements provided by Jack MacFarland, and assessment of whether Rose's success was inevitable.
Questions for Exploring Connections:
Comparing Rose's educational experiences with John Taylor Gatto's critique in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher".
Applying Michael Moore's arguments in "Idiot Nation" to the academic attitudes of Rose's peers, and accounting for adolescent acceptance of intellectual mediocrity.
Graphical assignment: Creating a Matt Groening-style cartoon depicting Rose's vocational tracking experience.
Dialogue construction based on Gregory Mantsios's "Class in America: Myths and Realities (2000)", analyzing why specific individuals overcome socio-economic class barriers while others (Dave Snyder, Ted Richard, Ken Harvey) do not.
Questions for Extending the Critical Context:
Identifying disorienting aspects of high school and higher education, with concrete recommendations for student coping strategies and institutional intervention.
Descriptive character sketch: Analyzing how a specific high school classmate coped or failed to cope with institutional tracking.
Film analysis: Evaluating cinematic depictions of charismatic teachers (Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society) against the portrayal of Jack MacFarland, highlighting advantages and disadvantages of charismatic instruction.
Impact of Vocational Education
General Effect: Vocational education acted as a dumping ground for disaffected students rather than a place of true learning. It placed Rose and his peers in dead-end courses like Business Math, Typing, and English–Level D, teaching them to coast through school without intellectual challenge.
Intellectual, Emotional, and Social Effects
Intellectually: Students developed flawed problem-solving habits and defensive tuning out. They learned to reject intellectual effort, cultivate stupidity, and treat academic work with sarcasm or apathy.
Emotionally: Tracking created feelings of embarrassment, frustration, and disorientation. To protect their self-esteem from being labeled "slow," students defensively embraced mediocrity ("I just wanna be average") and internalized failure as an organic defect.
Socially: It grouped disaffected peers together (surfers, hodads, South L.A. students), creating a shared culture of detachment from school where social status was built on physical prowess, wit, or street independence rather than academic achievement.
Difficulty Catching Up in Math
Deficit in Foundations: Years of remedial tracking left Rose with severe mathematical gaps in basic operations like simplifying algebraic fractions or handling square roots.
Psychological Frustration: Facing material he felt he should have learned years earlier triggered embarrassment, anxiety, and attention wavering. The tension made him daydream, crumple paper, and give up, ultimately leading to the belief that "that part of my brain just doesn't work."
Supporting Quotes
On Intellectual Impact: "During my time in Voc. Ed., I developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to handle: I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with history."
On Math Frustration: "There is, rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of long-standing inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn, organic: 'That part of my brain just doesn't work.'"