Lives on the Boundary

The last book on my sabbatical reading list was Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary. Part memoir, part rhetorical theory, part public policy polemic, and always engaging, re-reading it was well worth my time. I’d forgotten that CCCC ’93 in San Diego, he’d autographed my copy. “Best Wishes. Mike Rose. CCCC ’93.” Bonus for me. (In truth, I have no memory of meeting him. It could be that he autographed a stack and I bought one. In that case, dubious bonus status.)

Regardless, it’s a great book about educating what Rose calls the educational underclass – those that end up in community college or community education programs to whom the mysteries of the ivory tower remain tantalizing, but out of reach. For the most part, these are the students we teach at Lake Superior College.

The first half of the book charts his own education growing up on Vermont Ave. in LA. I think Monopoly got Vermont about right, based on Rose’s portrait (probably worth not one cent more than the $100 asking price). It wasn’t the toughest part of LA, but it was definitely no easy place to grow up. By high school, he’d been labeled “Voc Ed” and was mired in lethargic disinterest until, almost by accident, one of his teachers lit an intellectual spark. His last two years of high school marked an awakening, guided by his English teacher Jack McFarland, which eventually led him to Loyola University, where he nearly flunked out but for the intervention of a couple other teachers there. Finally, he ends up in grad school at UCLA, where he finally becomes disinterested/disillusioned pursuing a PhD in favor of getting involved in literacy.

He joins something called The Teacher Corps in the late ’60s working with disadvantaged South LA elementary students, works for several years with Vietnam Vets in a rehabilitation program, directs a Tutor Center at UCLA, and continues to work with programs that, one way or another, help disadvantaged students gain access to higher education through literacy.

Here’s a smattering of Rosey (though not always rosy) insights:

• Describing remedial literacy curriculum based on “subskills” and achievement tests, he writes, “There ended up being little room in such a 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 into written language, listening to and reading stories, playing with the sounds of words.” (109)
• On how we writing teachers interpret error, he writes, “As writers move further away from familiar ways of expressing themselves, the strains on their cognitive and linguistic resources increase, and the number of mechanical and grammatical errors they make shoots up. Before we shake our heads at these errors, we should also consider the possibility that many such linguistic bungles are signs of growth… Error takes place where education begins.” (188-9)
• On how college teachers are trained, he writes, “People emerge from graduate study, then, as political scientists or astronomers or botanists – but not necessarily as educators…it is pretty unlikely that they have been encouraged to think about, say, the cognitive difficulties young people have as they learn how to conduct inquiry in physics or anthropology or linguistics…” (196)
• Finally, “Through all my experiences with people struggling to learn, the one things that strikes me most is the ease with which we misperceive failed performance and the degree to which this misperception both reflects and reinforces the social order.” (205)

Rose ends by talking about what literacy – education and higher ed in general – could be, suggesting “that education is one culture embracing another.” (225) Anyone want a hug?

Seriously, what Rose reminds me ultimately is how human any teaching, but particularly the teaching of writing, is.