Why is that? I won’t learn the same things that Mike Rose’s mother learned by going to college, but my generation is still practically forced to undergo excess education passed high school. In today’s world, an education is needed in order to get any type of job, and why is that? Back then men could be firefighters (my grandpa) or a warehouse manager (my dad) without any excess education outside of grade school, but today you have to have some college experience to be a firefighter. It's evident that Rose is trying to make the reader see a per. But he always uses examples of how people skills are extremely important and school doesn’t necessarily teach that being friendly and being consistent isn’t in a school’s curriculum. In the story 'Blue-Collar Brilliance' the author Mike Rose describes how hard a blue-collar job really is through observing his mother work as a waitress and his uncle as a factory worker who made his way up to manager. Also, in the story, the author talks about the demise of Rose's father, which in the text said, My father was. This signifies that they are not from affluent families. Rose’s classmates who are satisfied with being average. He uses many different examples of how people have to use basic math skills, writing skills, and reading skills that you typically learn in a classroom, to preform a job. According to Rose, he said Ken thought about it, but just for a second, and said, 'I just wanna be average.' (128). I think that Mike Rose is correct in his arguments. Joe learned things being a supervisor that school would have never taught him, and he became a supervisor without a high school level education. From there, he jumped from job-to-job and ended up being a supervisor in the paint-and-body department at General Motors. He uses his Uncle Joe as his primary example: Joe (like his mother) dropped out of school at a young age to become a worker. Many people think that schooling is the only way to gain intelligence, and history somewhat proves this. All in all, he thinks of his mother as a very intelligent human being who “solved technical problems and human problems on the fly” (page 244). He used many different examples to support this statement, too. He explains that a waitress and those who work at similar family restaurants (who have “blue collar jobs”) have to use their “body and brain” to be good at their job. She was a waitress, and a successful one, at different family restaurants. Mike Rose begins this passage with explaining his mother’s job. Mike Rose, a professor at UCLA, wrote Bl ue-Collar Brilliance to provide evidence to show that blue-collar workers are just as intelligent as anyone el se. Intelligence is closely associated with the formal education- the type of schooling a person has, how much, and how long- and most people seem to move comfortably from that notion to a belief that work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence. 243-255. Print.īlue-collar, Waitress, Intelligence, Schooling, Work, Cognitions, Communication, Skills ” They Say/ I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing With Readings.

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