"I just wanna be average" by Mike Rose

-Mike Rose describes his experience in vocational track as a place where teachers were less motivated to teach and students sought out their own interests; not so much traditional school curriculum. The environment wasn't that of normal school classrooms. There wasn't order and rules didn't seem to phase the students, "Spanish was a particularly rowdy class, and Mr. Montez was as prepared for it as a doily maker at a hammer throw," Rose says. Personally, I have had a few teachers who match the description of those described in the essay. For example, the high school football coach taught my history class and lacked the necessary tools to be a teacher. On numerous occasions we would catch him sleeping at his desk while we would work on a stack of tedious handouts he had given us.

-Voc. Ed. brought in kids from all sorts of different backgrounds, which gave the program a lot of diversity. Everyone had their own type of intelligence; drifting away from the standard curriculum to follow their own interests; "If you're a kid like Ted Richard, you turn your back on all of this and let your mind roam where it may," Rose says. The reason Rose had a hard time in math was because of his past learning's. He blames the fact that he had been taught ineffective ways of doing algebra, as well as not focusing in elementary school.

-Everyone is different, thus school is a different experience for each person. For Ken Harvey found himself in a place where a lot was happening at once. A place where you can be quickly labeled as "slow" or smart; the opportunity to excel excites some, others not. A place where there are kids from all kinds of backgrounds with different beliefs. As Ken Harvey finds himself in a place where you can achieve or fail he decides to settle for average; his way of coping with the pressure it seems. As for the other students, they also have their own way of dealing with the pressure. Like I mentioned in the above answers, each student seems to have their own interests; in which they follow to keep their mind free from stress and pressure school comes with. They decide that settling for average and "acting stoned" is a defensive tool that "neutralizes the insult and frustration of being a vocational kid..." Says Rose.

-What can be disorienting about college is a students learning type vs the instructor's teaching methods. Sometimes you can have a teacher who teaches mostly through long lectures; therefore a student who is a kinesthetic learner is going to have a hard time understanding the lesson. I took a class where the instructor would lecture us on a subject for a long period of time and followed it with assignment. The auditory learners would mostly understand, opposed to the visual learners, who were lost after the first five minutes of the lecture. The solution to this problem is for students to practice different learning styles and for teachers to consider having a variety of teaching styles.

-My educational experience is similar to that of Mike Roses because I too had the experience of working with a diverse team of members who were from different backgrounds and had different beliefs. During my learning experience of becoming a arborist I had the opportunity to learn about my fellow co-workers, which became another learning experience.