Essay 3 Prewriting

From Mike Rose’s experience in Vocational school he learned man life lessons from his friend, the community, the teachers and the lessons they taught. His friends were all able to react differently to certain situations and they all had their own personality that let them adapt to life in Baltimore. Ken Harvey, his friend, was the one who quoted “I just wanna be average” (28).  Rose and his friends were placed into a school with people of all different backgrounds, families and intelligence. The school would places the “elites”into the higher level classes and proiritze them and for the rest of the student body, they were lucky to be taking the classes they needed. However, Ted, was not drowned by the school. He was able to life life unworried when there are issues going on but he was able to cope with them when Ken and many others couldn’t. And I think the most important lesson he learned from them is that life will throw many curve balls at your bat but how you handle them is what matters most, not if you’re enrolled in physics or not. Looking through the lens of Coates, if Ken Harvey were black Rose would say that Ken Harvey wanted to be white when he says he just wants to be average, because in Coates’s article he speaks of black people wanting the life of white people and to be white was to be average.