USA: +1(669)289-8683 
Sign in
Read “Mindsets Microsystems Prompt” for more information!!!
– 4 Page MLA format paper essay
-Read “The Mindsets” by Carol Dweck
-Read “I Just Wanna Be Average.” by Mike Rose
Mindsets & Microsystems
What factors in our microsystems shape our theories of intelligence? (This is the belief in our intelligence, not our actual intelligence). What factors cause us to believe that we can’t learn? What factors shape our behavior so that we either enjoy or “hate” hard work, either take or avoid risks, either appreciate or are offended by constructive criticism?
Using the texts and concepts we’ve read and discussed so far, write a 4-page (MLA format) essay in which you discuss relationships between the microsystems we live in and our mindsets. Cite the microsystemic factors that shaped the students’ as well as the teachers’ mindsets from Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average.” Use these examples to
support your claim about the relationship between microsystems and mindsets
.
Some Prewriting Strategies:
o First review Carol Dweck’s first chapter from Mindsets. Ask yourself: what characteristics and behaviors are associated with each mindset?
o Next, re-read Rose’s text and closely examine his lush renderings of the microsystems or environments (home, school, neighborhood) that shaped the students. Think about what Rose is saying in terms or the shaping power of our environments on people’s mindset. Note that it will change from time to time (hint) based on the environment he’s in. Consider that carefully, and see if you can discern a pattern.
o Be sure to explain and argue why and how the examples you present support your claim. o You may want to create your own version of Urie Bronfrenbrenner’s Human Ecology
graph to plot factors in the microsystems you’ve identified in Rose’s text.
Assessment:
Papers will be assessed according to the concision of the prose, the clarity of the argument, the quality of the examples chosen to support that argument, and how true the writer has been to the spirit of the texts s/he addresses.
Significance: This assignment offers students the opportunity to have a go at synthesizing schemas and applying general concepts to specific instances. This synthetic thinking is difficult to represent in writing, and the “Environment/Mindset” paper offers students the chance to practice in a relatively low-risk environment.
! 1!
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
by Carol Dweck
Chapter 1
The Mindsets
As a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life. I was
obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by
watching how students grapple with hard problems. So I brought children one at a time to
a room in their school, made them comfortable, and then gave them a series of puzzles to
solve. The first ones were fairly easy, but the next ones were hard. As the students
grunted, perspired, and toiled, I watched their strategies and probed what they were
thinking and feeling. I expected differences among children in how they coped with the
difficulty, but I saw something I never expected.
Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his
hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, “I love a challenge!” Another, sweating
away on these puzzles, looked up with a pleased expression and said with authority, “You
know, I was hoping this would be informative!”
What’s wrong with them? I wondered. I always thought you coped with failure or you
didn’t cope with failure. I never thought anyone loved failure. Were these alien children
or were they on to something?
Everyone has a role model, someone who pointed the way at a critical moment in their
lives. These children were my role models. They obviously knew something I didn’t and
I was determined to figure it out—to understand the kind of mindset that could turn a
failure into a gift.
What did they know? They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could
be cultivated through effort. And that’s what they were doing—getting smarter. Not only
weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They
thought they were learning.
I, on the other hand, thought human qualities were carved in stone. You were smart or
you weren’t, and failure meant you weren’t. It was that simple. If you could arrange
successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart. Struggles, mistakes,
perseverance were just not part of this picture.
Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in
stone is an old issue. What these beliefs mean for you is a new one: What are the
consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can
develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait? Let’s first look in on
the age-old, fiercely waged debate about human nature and then return to the question of
what these beliefs mean for you.
! 2!
WHY DO PEOPLE DIFFER?
Since the dawn of time, people have thought differently, acted differently, and fared
differently from each other. It was guaranteed that someone would ask the question of
why people differed—why some people are smarter or more moral—and whether there
was something that made them permanently different. Experts lined up on both sides.
Some claimed that there was a strong physical basis for these differences, making them
unavoidable and unalterable. Through the ages, these alleged physical differences have
included bumps on the skull (phrenology), the size and shape of the skull (craniology),
and, today, genes.
Others pointed to the strong differences in people’s backgrounds, experiences, training,
or ways of learning. It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was
Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Wasn’t the IQ test meant to summarize
children’s unchangeable intelligence? In fact, no. Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in
the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting
from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get
them back on track. Without denying individual differences in children’s intellects, he
believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in
intelligence. Here is a quote from one of his major books, Modern Ideas About Children,
in which he summarizes his work with hundreds of children with learning difficulties:
A few modern philosophers . . . assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity,
a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal
pessimism. . . . With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our
attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we
were before.
Who’s right? Today most experts agree that it’s not either–or. It’s not nature or nurture,
genes or environment. From conception on, there’s a constant give and take between the
two. In fact, as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist, put it, not only do genes and
environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to
work properly.
At the same time, scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong
learning and brain development than they ever thought. Of course, each person has a
unique genetic endowment. People may start with different temperaments and different
aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of
the way. Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major
factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful
engagement.” Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start
out the smartest who end up the smartest.
Ronald Farol
Ronald Farol
! 3!
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR YOU? THE TWO MINDSETS
It’s one thing to have pundits spouting their opinions about scientific issues. It’s another
thing to understand how these views apply to you. For twenty years, my research has
shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you
accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have
the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life?
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency
to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a
certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you
have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most
basic characteristics.
Some of us are trained in this mindset from an early age. Even as a child, I was focused
on being smart, but the fixed mindset was really stamped in by Mrs. Wilson, my sixth-
grade teacher. Unlike Alfred Binet, she believed that people’s IQ scores told the whole
story of who they were. We were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the
highest-IQ students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers, or take a note to
the principal. Aside from the daily stomachaches she provoked with her judgmental
stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming
goal—look smart, don’t look dumb. Who cared about or enjoyed learning when our
whole being was at stake every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?
I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—in the
classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a
confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated:
Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I
feel like a winner or a loser?
But doesn’t our society value intelligence, personality, and character? Isn’t it normal to
want these traits? Yes, but . . .
There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have
to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush
when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is
just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that
your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people
may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or
temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper
motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a
person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what
can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.
Ronald Farol
Ronald Farol
Ronald Farol
! 4!
Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben
Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and
graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually
every list of the most important artists of the twentieth century, failed her first
photography course? That Geraldine Page, one of our greatest actresses, was advised to
give it up for lack of talent?
You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for
learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be
getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends
or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also
challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that
will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or
especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the
mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their
lives.
A VIEW FROM THE TWO MINDSETS
To give you a better sense of how the two mindsets work, imagine—as vividly as you
can—that you are a young adult having a really bad day:
One day, you go to a class that is really important to you and that you like a lot. The
professor returns the midterm papers to the class. You got a C+. You’re very
disappointed. That evening on the way back to your home, you find that you’ve gotten a
parking ticket. Being really frustrated, you call your best friend to share your experience
but are sort of brushed off.
What would you think? What would you feel? What would you do?
When I asked people with the fixed mindset, this is what they said: “I’d feel like a
reject.” “I’m a total failure.” “I’m an idiot.” “I’m a loser.” “I’d feel worthless and
dumb—everyone’s better than me.” “I’m slime.” In other words, they’d see what
happened as a direct measure of their competence and worth.
This is what they’d think about their lives: “My life is pitiful.” “I have no life.”
“Somebody upstairs doesn’t like me.” “The world is out to get me.” “Someone is out to
destroy me.” “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me.” “Life is unfair and all efforts are
useless.” “Life stinks. I’m stupid. Nothing good ever happens to me.” “I’m the most
unlucky person on this earth.”
Excuse me, was there death and destruction, or just a grade, a ticket, and a bad phone
call?
Are these just people with low self-esteem? Or card-carrying pessimists? No. When they
aren’t coping with failure, they feel just as worthy and optimistic—and bright and
Ronald Farol
Ronald Farol
! 5!
attractive—as people with the growth mindset.
So how would they cope? “I wouldn’t bother to put so much time and effort into doing
well in anything.” (In other words, don’t let anyone measure you again.) “Do nothing.”
“Stay in bed.” “Get drunk.” “Eat.” “Yell at someone if I get a chance to.” “Eat
chocolate.” “Listen to music and pout.” “Go into my closet and sit there.” “Pick a fight
with somebody.” “Cry.” “Break something.” “What is there to do?”
What is there to do! You know, when I wrote the vignette, I intentionally made the grade
a C+, not an F. It was a midterm rather than a final. It was a parking ticket, not a car
wreck. They were “sort of brushed off,” not rejected outright. Nothing catastrophic or
irreversible happened. Yet from this raw material the fixed mindset created the feeling of
utter failure and paralysis.
When I gave people with the growth mindset the same vignette, here’s what they said.
They’d think:
“I need to try harder in class, be more careful when parking the car, and wonder if my
friend had a bad day.”
“The C+ would tell me that I’d have to work a lot harder in the class, but I have the rest
of the semester to pull up my grade.”
There were many, many more like this, but I think you get the idea. Now, how would
they cope? Directly.
“I’d start thinking about studying harder (or studying in a different way) for my next test
in that class, I’d pay the ticket, and I’d work things out with my best friend the next time
we speak.”
“I’d look at what was wrong on my exam, resolve to do better, pay my parking ticket, and
call my friend to tell her I was upset the day before.”
“Work hard on my next paper, speak to the teacher, be more careful where I park or
contest the ticket, and find out what’s wrong with my friend.”
You don’t have to have one mindset or the other to be upset. Who wouldn’t be? Things
like a poor grade or a rebuff from a friend or loved one—these are not fun events. No one
was smacking their lips with relish. Yet those people with the growth mindset were not
labeling themselves and throwing up their hands. Even though they felt distressed, they
were ready to take the risks, confront the challenges, and keep working at them.
! 6!
SO, WHAT’S NEW?
Is this such a novel idea? We have lots of sayings that stress the importance of
risk and the power of persistence, such as “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “If at
first you don’t succeed, try, try again” or “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” (By the way, I
was delighted to learn that the Italians have the same expression.) What is truly amazing
is that people with the fixed mindset would not agree. For them, it’s “Nothing ventured,
nothing lost.” “If at first you don’t succeed, you probably don’t have the ability.” “If
Rome wasn’t built in a day, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.” In other words, risk and effort
are two things that might reveal your inadequacies and show that you were not up to the
task. In fact, it’s startling to see the degree to which people with the fixed mindset do not
believe in effort.
Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House,
2006. Print.
“I Just Wanna Be Average”
MIKE ROSE
Mike Rose is anything but average: he has published poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and two
widely praised books on education in America. A professor in the School of Education at UCLA, Rose
has won awards from the National Academy of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English,
and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Below you’ll read the story of how this highly
successful teacher and writer started high school in the “vocational education” track, learning dead-end
skills from teachers who were often underprepared or incompetent. Rose shows that students whom the
system has written off can have tremendous unrealized potential, and his critique of the school system
specifies several reasons for the ‘failure” of students who go through high school belligerent, fearful,
stoned, frustrated, or just plain bored. This selection comes from Lives on the Boundary (1989), Rose’s
exploration of America’s educationally underprivileged. His most recent book, Possible Lives (1996),
offers a nationwide tour of creative classrooms and innovative educational programs. Rose is currently
researching a new book on the thinking patterns of blue-collar workers.
It took two buses to get to Our Lady of Mercy. The first started deep in South Los Angeles and
caught me at midpoint. The second drifted through neighborhoods with trees, parks, big lawns, and lots of
flowers. The rides were long but were livened up by a group of South L.A. veterans whose parents also
thought that Hope had set up shop in the west end of the county. There was Christy Biggars, who, at
sixteen, was dealing and was, according to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill Cobb and Johnny
Gonzales, grease-pencil artists extraordinaire, who left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of “Cobb” and
“Johnny” on the corrugated walls of the bus. And then there was Tyrrell Wilson. Tyrrell was the coolest
kid I knew. He ran the dozens1 like a metric halfback, laid down a rap that outrhymed and outpointed
Cobb, whose rap was good but not great-the curse of a moderately soulful kid trapped in white skin. But it
was Cobb who would sneak a radio onto the bus, and thus underwrote his patter with Little Richard, Fats
Domino, Chuck Berry, the Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe’s mother-in-law, an awful woman who was “sent
from down below.” And so it was that Christy and Cobb and Johnny G. and Tyrrell and I and assorted
others picked up along the way passed our days in the back of the bus, a funny mix brought together by
geography and parental desire.
Entrance to school brings with it forms and releases and assessments. Mercy relied on a series of
tests…for placement, and somehow the results of my tests got confused with those of another student
named Rose. The other Rose apparently didn’t do very well, for I was placed in the vocational track, a
euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant. We had no sense that
Business Math, Typing, and English-Level D were dead ends. The current spate of reports on the schools
criticizes parents for not involving themselves in the education of their children. But how would someone
like Tommy Rose, with his two years of Italian schooling, know what to ask? And what sort of pressure
could an exhausted waitress apply? The error went undetected, and I remained in the vocational track for
two years. What a place.
My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and unstable man who also taught
freshman English. When his class drifted away from him, which was often, his voice would rise in
paranoid accusations, and occasionally he would lose control and shake or smack us. I hadn’t been there
two months when one of his brisk, face-turning slaps had my glasses sliding down the aisle. Physical
education was also pretty harsh. Our teacher was a stubby ex-lineman who had played old-time pro ball in
the Midwest. He routinely had us grabbing our ankles to receive his stinging paddle across our butts. He
did that, he said, to make men of us. “Rose,” he bellowed on our first encounter; me standing geeky in
line in my baggy shorts. “‘Rose’ ? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“Italian, sir,” I squeaked.
“Italian! Ho. Rose, do you know the sound a bag of shit makes when it
hits the wall?”
1 A verbal game of African origin in which competitors try to top each other’s insults.
Rose 2
“No, sir.”
“Wop!”
Sophomore English was taught by Mr. Mitropetros. He was a large, bejeweled man who managed the
parking lot at the Shrine Auditorium. He would crow and preen and list for us the stars he’d brushed
against. We’d ask questions and glance knowingly and snicker, and all that fueled the poor guy to brag
some more. Parking cars was his night job. He had little training in English, so his lesson plan for his day
work had us reading the district’s required text, Julius Caesar, aloud for the semester. We’d finished the
play way before the twenty weeks was up, so he’d have us switch parts again and again and start again:
Dave Snyder, the fastest guy at Mercy, muscling through Caesar to the breathless squeals of Calpurnia, as
interpreted by Steve Fusco, a surfer who owned the school’s most envied paneled wagon. Week ten and
Dave and Steve would take on new roles, as would we all, and render a water-logged Cassius and a
Brutus that are beyond my powers of description.
Spanish I – taken in the second year – fell into the hands of a new recruit. Mr. Montez was a tiny man,
slight, five foot six at the most, soft-spoken and delicate. Spanish was a particularly rowdy class, and Mr.
Montez was as prepared for it as a doily maker at a hammer throw. He would tap his pencil to a room in
which Steve Fusco was propelling spitballs from his heavy lips, in which Mike Dweetz was taunting Billy
Hawk, a half-Indian, half-Spanish, reed-thin, quietly explosive boy. The vocational track at Our Lady of
Mercy mixed kids traveling in from South L.A. with South Bay surfers and a few Slavs and Chicanos
from the harbors of San Pedro. This was a dangerous miscellany: surfers and hodads and South-Central
blacks all ablaze to the metronomic tapping of Hector Montez’s pencil.
One day Billy lost it. Out of the comer of my eye I saw him strike out with his right arm and catch
Dweetz across the neck. Quick as a spasm, Dweetz was out of his seat, scattering desks, cracking Billy on
the side of the head, right behind the eye. Snyder and Fusco and others broke it up, but the room felt hot
and close and naked. Mr. Montez’s tenuous authority was finally ripped to shreds, and I think everyone
felt a little strange about that. The charade was over, and when it came down to it, I don’t think any of the
kids really wanted it to end this way. They had pushed and pushed and bullied their way into a freedom
that both scared and embarrassed them.
Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing in
pretty shallow water. Vocational education has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of
students who do not do well in our schools. Some serious programs succeed in doing that, and through
exceptional teachers…students learn to develop hypotheses and troubleshoot, reason through a problem,
and communicate effectively – the true job skills. The vocational track, however, is most often a place for
those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected. There were a few teachers who
worked hard at education; young Brother Slattery, for example, combined a stern voice with weekly
quizzes to try to pass along to us a skeletal outline of world history. But mostly the teachers had no idea
of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond.
And the teachers would have needed some inventiveness, for none of us was groomed for the
classroom. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know things – didn’t know how to simplify algebraic fractions,
couldn’t identify different kinds of clauses, bungled Spanish translations – but that I had developed
various faulty and inadequate ways of doing algebra and making sense of Spanish. Worse yet, the years of
defensive tuning out in elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly while seeming at least
half alert. 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. My attention flitted here and there. I fooled around in class and
read my books indifferently – the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I did what I had to do
to get by, and I did it with half a mind.
But I did learn things about people and eventually came into my own socially. I liked the guys in
Voc. Ed. Growing up where I did, I understood and admired physical prowess, and there was an
abundance of muscle here. There was Dave Snyder, a sprinter and halfback of true quality. Dave’s
ability and his quick wit gave him a natural appeal, and he was welcome in any clique, though he
always kept a little independent. He enjoyed acting the fool and could care less about studies, but he
possessed a certain maturity and never caused the faculty much trouble. It was a testament to his inde-
pendence that he included me among his friends – I eventually went out for track, but I was no jock.
Owing to the Latin alphabet and a dearth of Rs and Ss, Snyder sat behind Rose, and we started
Rose 3
exchanging one-liners and became friends.
There was Ted Richard, a much-touted Little League pitcher. He was chunky and had a baby face and
came to Our Lady of Mercy as a seasoned street fighter. Ted was quick to laugh and he had a loud, jolly
laugh, but when he got angry he’d smile a little smile, the kind that simply raises the comer of the mouth a
quarter of an inch. For those who knew, it was an eerie signal. Those who didn’t found themselves in big
trouble, for Ted was very quick. He loved to carry on what we would come to call philosophical
discussions: What is courage? Does God exist? He also loved words, enjoyed picking up big ones like
salubrious and equivocal and using them in our conversations -laughing at himself as the word hit a
chuckhole rolling off his tongue. Ted didn’t do all that well in school- baseball and parties and testing the
courage he’d speculated about took up his time. His textbooks were Argosy and Field and Stream,
whatever newspapers he’d find on the bus stop – from the Daily Worker to pornography – conversations
with uncles or hobos or businessmen he’d meet in a coffee shop, The Old Man and the Sea. With
hindsight, I can see that Ted was developing into one of those rough-hewn intellectuals whose sources are
a mix of the learned and the apocryphal, whose discussions are both assured and sad.
And then there was Ken Harvey. Ken was good-looking in a puffy way and had a full and oily
ducktail and was a car enthusiast. . . a hodad. One day in religion class, he said the sentence that turned
out to be one of the most memorable of the hundreds of thousands I heard in those Voc. Ed. years. We
were talking about the parable of the talents, about achievement, working hard, doing the best you can do,
blah-blah-blah, when the teacher called on the restive Ken Harvey for an opinion. Ken thought about it,
but just for a second, and said (with studied, minimal affect), “I just wanna be average.” That woke me
up. Average? Who wants to be average? Then the athletes chimed in with the cliches that make you want
to laryngectomize them, and the exchange became a platitudinous melee. At the time, I thought Ken’s
assertion was stupid, and I wrote him off. But his sentence has stayed with me all these years, and I think
I am finally coming to understand it.
Ken Harvey was gasping for air. School can be a tremendously disorienting place. No matter how
bad the school, you’re going to encounter notions that don’t fit with the assumptions and beliefs that you
grew up with – maybe you’ll hear these dissonant notions from teachers, maybe from the other students,
and maybe you’ll read them. You’ll also be thrown in with all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds,
and that can be unsettling – this is especially true in places of rich ethnic and linguistic mix, like the L.A.
basin. You’ll see a handful of students far excel you in courses that sound exotic and that are only in the
curriculum of the elite: French, physics, trigonometry. And all this is happening while you’re trying to
shape an identity, your body is changing, and your emotions are running wild. If you’re a working-class
kid in the vocational track, the options you’ll have to deal with this will be constrained in certain ways:
you’re defined by your school as “slow”; you’re placed in a curriculum that isn’t designed to liberate you
but to occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you, though the training is for work the society does not
esteem; other students are picking up the cues from your school and your curriculum and interacting with
you in particular ways. If you’re a kid like Ted Richard, you turn your back on all this and let your mind
roam where it may. But youngsters like Ted are rare. What Ken and so many others do is protect
themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance the identity implied in the
vocational track. Reject the confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe.
Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything
you – and the others – fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scien-
tific reasoning, philosophical inquiry.
The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work.
You’ll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to
cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world. Keep
your vocabulary simple, act stoned when you’re not or act more stoned than you are, flaunt ignorance,
materialize your dreams. It is a powerful and effective defense – it neutralizes the insult and the frustration
of being a vocational kid and, when perfected, it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful secondary effect.
But like all strong magic, it exacts a price.
My own deliverance from the Voc. Ed. world began with sophomore biology. Every student, college
prep to vocational, had to take biology, and unlike the other courses, the same person taught all sections.
When teaching the vocational group, Brother Clint probably slowed down a bit or omitted a little of the
fundamental biochemistry, but he used the same book and more or less the same syllabus across the
Rose 4
board. If one class got tough, he could get tougher. He was young and powerful and very handsome, and
looks and physical strength were high currency. No one gave him any trouble.
I was pretty bad at the dissecting table, but the lectures and the textbook were interesting: plastic
overlays that, with each turned page, peeled away skin, then veins and muscle, then organs, down to the
very bones that Brother Clint, pointer in hand, would tap out on our hanging skeleton. Dave Snyder was
in big trouble, for the study of life – versus the living of it-was sticking in his craw. We worked out a code
for our multiple-choice exams. He’d poke me in the back: once for the answer under A, twice for B, and so
on; and when he’d hit the right one, I’d look up to the ceiling as though I were lost in thought. Poke:
cytoplasm. Poke, poke: methane. Poke, poke, poke: William Harvey. Poke, poke, poke, poke: islets of
Langerhans. This didn’t work out perfectly, but Dave passed the course, and I mastered the dreamy look
of a guy on a record jacket. And something else happened. Brother Clint puzzled over this Voc. Ed. kid
who was racking up 98s and 99s on his tests. He checked the school’s records and discovered the error.
He recommended that I begin my junior year in the College Prep program. According to all I’ve read
since, such a shift, as one report put it, is virtually impossible. Kids at that level rarely cross tracks. The
telling thing is how chancy both my placement into and exit from Voc. Ed. was; neither I nor my parents
had anything to do with it. I lived in one world during spring semester, and when I came back to school in
the fall, I was living in another.
Switching to College Prep was a mixed blessing. I was an erratic student. I was undisciplined. And I
hadn’t caught onto the rules of the game: why work hard in a class that didn’t grab my fancy? I was also
hopelessly behind in math. Chemistry was hard; toying with my chemistry set years before hadn’t
prepared me for the chemist’s equations. Fortunately, the priest who taught both chemistry and second-
year algebra was also the school’s athletic director. Membership on the track team covered me; I knew I
wouldn’t get lower than a C. U.S. history was taught pretty well, and I did okay. But civics was taken over
by a football coach who had trouble reading the textbook aloud – and reading aloud was the centerpiece of
his pedagogy. College Prep at Mercy was certainly an improvement over the vocational program – at least
it carried some status – but the social science curriculum was weak, and the mathematics and physical
sciences were simply beyond me. I had a miserable quantitative background and ended up copying some
assignments and finessing the rest as best I could. Let me try to explain how it feels to see again and again
material you should once have learned but didn’t.
You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic fractions or to multiply expressions
containing square roots. You know this is pretty basic material because you’ve seen it for years. Once a
teacher took some time with you, and you learned how to carry out these operations. Simple versions,
anyway. But that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more complex versions, and now
you’re not sure. And this, you keep telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff.
Next it’s a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic elements are as familiar as story characters:
trains speeding so many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees. Maybe you
know enough, have sat through enough explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem: “If one
train is going this fast. . .” or “This shadow is really one line of a triangle…” Then: “Let’s see…” “How did
Jones do this?” “Hmmmm.” “No.” “No, that won’t work.” Your attention wavers. You wonder about
other things: a football game, a dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus on the
problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but the tension wins out and your attention flits
elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the frustration.
The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially those
in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and impenetrable
formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement here. No
excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. 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.” Given the troubling histories many of these
students have, it’s miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently to make de-
liverance from these classes possible.
Through this entire period, my father’s health was deteriorating with cruel momentum. His
arteriosclerosis progressed to the point where a simple nick on his shin wouldn’t heal. Eventually it
ulcerated and widened. Lou Minton would come by daily to change the dressing. We tried renting an
Rose 5
oscillating bed – which we placed in the front room – to force blood through the constricted arteries in my
father’s legs. The bed hummed through the night, moving in place to ward off the inevitable. The ulcer
continued to spread, and the doctors finally had to amputate. My grandfather had lost his leg in a
stockyard accident. Now my father too was crippled. His convalescence was slow but steady, and the
doctors placed him in the Santa Monica Rehabilitation Center, a sun-bleached building that opened out
onto the warm spray of the Pacific. The place gave him some strength and some color and some training
in walking with an artificial leg. He did pretty well for a year or so until he slipped and broke his hip. He
was confined to a wheelchair after that, and the confinement contributed to the diminishing of his body
and spirit.
I am holding a picture of him. He is sitting in his wheelchair and smiling at the camera. The smile
appears forced, unsteady, seems to quaver, though it is frozen in silver nitrate. He is in his mid-sixties and
looks eighty. Late in my junior year, he had a stroke and never came out of the resulting coma. After that,
I would see him only in dreams, and to this day that is how I join him. Sometimes the dreams are sad and
grisly and primal: my father lying in a bed soaked with his suppuration, holding me, rocking me. But
sometimes the dreams bring him back to me healthy: him talking to me on an empty street, or buying
some pictures to decorate our old house, or transformed somehow into someone strong and adept with
tools and the physical.
Jack MacFarland couldn’t have come into my life at a better time. My father was dead, and I had
logged up too many years of scholastic indifference. Mr. MacFarland had a master’s degree from
Columbia and decided, at twenty-six, to find a little school and teach his heart out. He never took any
credentialing courses, couldn’t bear to, he said, so he had to find employment in a private system. He
ended up at Our Lady of Mercy teaching five sections of senior English. He was a beatnik who was born
too late. His teeth were stained, he tucked his sorry tie in between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt,
and his pants were chronically wrinkled. At first, we couldn’t believe this guy, thought he slept in his car.
But within no time, he had us so startled with work that we didn’t much worry about where he slept or if
he slept at all. We wrote three or four essays a month. We read a book every two to three weeks, starting
with the Iliad and ending up with Hemingway. He gave us a quiz on the reading every other day. He
brought a prep school curriculum to Mercy High.
MacFarland’s lectures were crafted, and as he delivered them he would pace the room jiggling a
piece of chalk in his cupped hand, using it to scribble on the board the names of all the writers and
philosophers and plays and novels he was weaving into his discussion. He asked questions often, raised
everything from Zeno’s paradox to the repeated last line of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening.” He slowly and carefully built up our knowledge of Western intellectual history-with facts,
with connections, with speculations. We learned about Greek philosophy, about Dante, the Elizabethan
world view, the Age of Reason, existentialism. He analyzed poems with us, had us reading sections
from John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, making a potentially difficult book accessible with his
own explanations. We gave oral reports on poems Ciardi didn’t cover. We imitated the styles of
Conrad, Hemingway, and Time magazine. We wrote and talked, wrote and talked. The man immersed
us in language.
Even MacFarland’s barbs were literary. If Jim Fitzsimmons, hung over and irritable, tried to smart-
ass him, he’d rejoin with a flourish that would spark the indomitable Skip Madison – who’d lost his
front teeth in a hapless tackle – to flick his tongue through the gap and opine, “good chop,” drawing out
the single “0” in stinging indictment. Jack MacFarland, this tobacco-stained intellectual, brandished
linguistic weapons of a kind I hadn’t encountered before. Here was this egghead, for God’s sake,
keeping some pretty difficult people in line. And from what I heard, Mike Dweetz and Steve Fusco and
all the notorious Voc. Ed. crowd settled down as well when MacFarland took the podium. Though a lot
of guys groused in the schoolyard, it just seemed that giving trouble to this particular teacher was a
silly thing to do. Tomfoolery, not to mention assault, had no place in the world he was trying to create
for us, and instinctively everyone knew that. If nothing else, we all recognized MacFarland’s
considerable intelligence and respected the hours he put into his work. It came to this: the troublemaker
would look foolish rather than daring. Even Jim Fitzsimmons was reading On the Road and turning his
incipient alcoholism to literary ends.
There were some lives that were already beyond Jack MacFarland’s ministrations, but mine was
not. I started reading again as I hadn’t since elementary school. I would go into our gloomy little
Rose 6
bedroom or sit at the dinner table while, on the television, Danny McShane was paralyzing Mr. Mota
with the atomic drop, and work slowly back through Heart of Darkness, trying to catch the words in
Conrad’s sentences. I certainly was not MacFarland’s best student; most of the other guys in College
Prep, even my fellow slackers, had better backgrounds than I did. But I worked very hard, for
MacFarland had hooked me. He tapped myoId interest in reading and creating stories. He gave me a
way to feel special by using my mind. And he provided a role model that wasn’t shaped on physical
prowess alone, and something inside me that I wasn’t quite aware of responded to that. Jack
MacFarland established a literacy club, to borrow a phrase of Frank Smith’s, and invited me – invited
all of us – to join.
There’s been a good deal of research and speculation suggesting that the acknowledgment of school
performance with extrinsic rewards – smiling faces, stars, numbers, grades – diminishes the intrinsic
satisfaction children experience by engaging in reading or writing or problem solving. While it’s
certainly true that we’ve created an educational system that encourages our best and brightest to
become cynical grade collectors and, in general, have developed an obsession with evaluation and
assessment, I must tell you that venal though it may have been, I loved getting good grades from
MacFarland. I now know how subjective grades can be, but then they came tucked in the back of
essays like bits of scientific data, some sort of spectroscopic readout that said, objectively and publicly,
that I had made something of value. I suppose I’d been mediocre for too long and enjoyed a public
redefinition. And I suppose the workings of my mind, such as they were, had been private for too long.
My linguistic play moved into the world; . . . these papers with their circled, red B-pluses and A-
minuses linked my mind to something outside it. I carried them around like a club emblem.
One day in the December of my senior year, Mr. MacFarland asked me where I was going to go to
college. I hadn’t thought much about it. Many of the students I teach today spent their last year in high
school with a physics text in one hand and the Stanford catalog in the other, but I wasn’t even aware of
what “entrance requirements” were. My folks would say that they wanted me to go to college and be a
doctor, but I don’t know how seriously I ever took that; it seemed a sweet thing to say, a bit of
supportive family chatter, like telling a gangly daughter she’s graceful. The reality of higher education
wasn’t in my scheme of things: no one in the family had gone to college; only two of my uncles had
completed high school. I figured I’d get a night job and go to the local junior college because I knew
that Snyder and Company were going there to play ball. But I hadn’t even prepared for that. When I
finally said, “I don’t know,” MacFarland looked down at me – I was seated in his office – and said,
“Listen, you can write.”
My grades stank. I had A’s in biology and a handful of B’s in a few English and social science
classes. All the rest were C’s – or worse. MacFarland said I would do well in his class and laid down
the law about doing well in the others. Still, the record for my first three years wouldn’t have been
acceptable to any four-year school. To nobody’s surprise, I was turned down flat by USC and UCLA.
But Jack MacFarland was on the case. He had received his bachelor’s degree from Loyola University,
so he made calls to old professors and talked to somebody in admissions and wrote me a strong letter.
Loyola finally accepted me as a probationary student. I would be on trial for the first year, and if I did
okay, I would be granted regular status. MacFarland also intervened to get me a loan, for I could never
have afforded a private college without it. Four more years of religion classes and four more years of
boys at one school, girls at another. But at least I was going to college. Amazing.
In my last semester of high school, I elected a special English course fashioned by Mr. MacFarland,
and it was through this elective that there arose at Mercy a fledgling literati. Art Mitz, the editor of the
school newspaper and a very smart guy, was the kingpin. He was joined by me and by Mark Dever, a
quiet boy who wrote beautifully and who would die before he was forty. MacFarland occasionally invited
us to his apartment, and those visits became the high point of our apprenticeship: we’d clamp on our
training wheels and drive to his salon.
He lived in a cramped and cluttered place near the airport, tucked away in the kind of building that
architectural critic Reyner Banham calls a dingbat. Books were allover: stacked, piled, tossed, and crated,
underlined and dog eared, well worn and new. Cigarette ashes crusted with coffee in saucers or spilling
over the sides of motel ashtrays. The little bedroom had, along two of its walls, bricks and boards loaded
with notes, magazines, and oversized books. The kitchen joined the living room, and there was a stack of
German newspapers under the sink. I had never seen anything like it: a great flophouse of language
Rose 7
furnished by City Lights and Cafe Ie Metro. I read every title. I flipped through paperbacks and scanned
jackets and memorized names: Gogol, Finnegans Wake, Djuna Barnes, Jackson Pollock, A Coney Island
of the Mind, F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, all sorts of Freud, Troubled Sleep, Man Ray, The
Education of Henry Adams, Richard Wright, Film as Art, William Butler Yeats, Marguerite Duras, Red-
burn, A Season in Hell, Kapital. On the cover of Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer was an Edward Gorey
drawing of a young man on a road winding into dark trees. By the hotplate sat a strange Kafka novel
called Amerika, in which an adolescent hero crosses the Atlantic to find the Nature Theater of Oklahoma.
Art and Mark would be talking about a movie or the school newspaper, and I would be consuming my
English teacher’s library. It was heady stuff. I felt like a Pop Warner athlete on steroids.
Art, Mark, and I would buy stogies and triangulate from MacFarland’s apartment to the Cinema,
which now shows X-rated films but was then L.A.’s premier art theater, and then to the musty Cherokee
Bookstore in Hollywood to hobnob with beatnik homosexuals – smoking, drinking bourbon and coffee,
and trying out awkward phrases we’d gleaned from our mentor’s bookshelves. I was happy and precocious
and a little scared as well, for Hollywood Boulevard was thick with a kind of decadence that was foreign
to the South Side. After the Cherokee, we would head back to the security of MacFarland’s apartment,
slaphappy with hipness.
Let me be the first to admit that there was a good deal of adolescent passion in this embrace of the
avant-garde: self-absorption, sexually charged pedantry, an elevation of the odd and abandoned. Still it
was a time during which I absorbed an awful lot of information: long lists of titles, images from
expressionist paintings, new wave shibboleths, snippets of philosophy, and names that read like Steve
Fusco’s misspellings – Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Now this is hardly the stuff of deep
understanding. But it was an introduction, a phrase book, a [travel guide] to a vocabulary of ideas, and it
felt good at the time to know all these words. With hindsight I realize how layered and important that
knowledge was.
It enabled me to do things in the world. I could browse bohemian bookstores in far-off, mysterious
Hollywood; I could go to the Cinema and see events through the lenses of European directors; and, most
of all, I could share an evening, talk that talk, with Jack MacFarland, the man I most admired at the time.
Knowledge was becoming a bonding agent. Within a year or two, the persona of the disaffected hipster
would prove too cynical, too alienated to last. But for a time it was new and exciting: it provided a critical
perspective on society, and it allowed me to act as though I were living beyond the limiting boundaries of
South Vermont.
Ronald Farol
Analysis
While summaries are concerned with restating an author’s ideas in order to demonstrate our
understanding of a text, the goal of analysis is to respond to and examine an author’s ideas or arguments.
Think of an analysis as an investigation. Most of us have seen on TV, or at least heard of the various
Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) shows. Think of what a forensic detective does when he or she is analyzing a
crime scene. The detective doesn’t simply look around for a few minutes, then say, “Wow, that’s messed
up,” and leave. The detective slips on the rubber gloves and gets down to business by looking at the
small—oftentimes, microscopic—detail to see beneath the obvious. When WE analyze, we try to see
beyond what is apparent or obvious to come to a deeper understanding of a given text. The objective is to
get to the center of HOW something works. For example, we know that people may fluctuate between a
fixed and growth mindset, but when we analyze, we’re trying to understand, explain or argue what factors
cause people’s mindsets or beliefs to fluctuate.
Sample Paragraphs:
Topic Sentence: One factor in the school environment that can put students in a fixed mindset is their
teacher’s expectations of them.
Context: In “I Just Wanna Be Average,” Mike Rose relates his experiences with his vocational
education teachers. One teacher, Mr. Mitropetros, had his students read Julius Caesar aloud for the
entire semester. Rose writes:
Quote/Example: “We’d finished the play way before the twenty weeks was up, so he’d have us switch
parts again and again and start again” (Rose 2).
Explanation/Analysis: The fact that Mr. Mitropetros only gave the class one text to read for the
entire semester says a lot about what he expected from his students. He obviously did not expect a lot
from them considering reading only one text for the entire semester lacks any kind of intellectual rigor.
When a teacher has low expectations for his students, or sets the bar low in the class, the students will not
push themselves to strive for growth. Some students may even start to believe they cannot handle
challenging work since the teacher does not believe they can anyway. Thus, many students like Mike
Rose that come from vocational education classes or remedial classes, taught by teachers with low
expectations, end up with a fixed mindset.
Transition: When a teacher has low expectations of student, the students may end up with low
expectations themselves.
Topic Sentence: Ken Harvey is one such student that developed a fixed mindset because of the low
expectations set by his vocational education teachers.
Context: When Rose’s Religion Studies teacher asks the class about goals and ambition, Ken Harvey
responds:
Quote: “’I just wanna be average’” (Rose 3).
Explanation/Analysis: Years of low expectations and the lack of challenges in his classes put Ken
Harvey in a fixed mindset. He not only thought he could not learn anything new but Ken Harvey even
lowered his own expectations. This is a trait of the fixed mindset. He perhaps lowers his expectations in
order to avoid challenges and rigor that he could potentially fail, which would make him appear “dumb.”
Many students become complacent or accustomed to doing things the easy way when little is expected of
them, but when they face a challenging task or question, they end up retreating into themselves in order
to avoid what they or others consider a failure. When students aren’t expected to excel, they will develop
lower expectations of themselves and a fixed mindset.
Mindsets Paper
by Jennif er Esquive
l
Submission dat e : 18- Feb- 2018 09:04 PM (UT C- 0800)
Submission ID: 917 993256
File name : Mindsets_Paper.do c (34 .5K)
Word count : 114 6
Charact e r count : 6005
Capitalize first letter of each word.
Work on title.
indent once
keep font consistent size 12
no need to
cite other
articles for
this essay.
l
Jennifer, you don’t need all this exposition on the
mindsets. All you need to do is define them in
your
intro. Your focus is what factors affect these mindsets.
Factor 1 (Should be in thesis)
Factor 2 (should be in thesis AND
it’s own topic sentence/paragraph)
What
factor
are
your
referri
ng to?
Factor 3
You need to
analyze and
explain HOW
this factor
helped Rose
slide into a
growth
mindset.
Don’t just
summarize
what
happened.
Remove extra spaces
Jennifer, this a good effort. Like I mentioned, you provide too
much exposition with the mindsets. Simply define them and give
Dweck credit in the introduction. Then develop a thesis that lists
what you believe to be the main influential factors on one’s
mindset. Next, each of your paragraphs ought to focus on one
factor at a time. You need to explain and analyze HOW these
factors affect the mindset. Grade; 7 Consider revising.
FINAL GRADE
/10
Mindsets Paper
GRADEMARK REPORT
GENERAL COMMENTS
Instructor
PAGE 1
Text Comment. Capitalize f irst letter o f each wo rd. Wo rk o n title.
Text Comment. indent o nce
Text Comment. keep f o nt co nsistent size 12
Text Comment. no need to cite o ther articles f o r this essay.
Text Comment. l
PAGE 2
Text Comment. Jennif er, yo u do n’t need all this expo sitio n o n the mindsets. All yo u need
to do is def ine them in yo ur intro . Yo ur f o cus is what f acto rs af f ect these mindsets.
PAGE 3
Text Comment. Facto r 1 (Sho uld be in thesis)
Text Comment. Facto r 2 (sho uld be in thesis AND it’s o wn to pic sentence/paragraph)
Text Comment. What f acto r are yo ur ref erring to ?
PAGE 4
Text Comment. Facto r 3
Text Comment. Yo u need to analyze and explain HOW this f acto r helped Ro se slide into a
gro wth mindset. Do n’t just summarize what happened.
PAGE 5
Text Comment. Remo ve extra spaces
Text Comment. Jennif er, this a go o d ef f o rt. Like I mentio ned, yo u pro vide to o much
expo sitio n with the mindsets. Simply def ine them and give Dweck credit in the intro ductio n. T hen
develo p a thesis that lists what yo u believe to be the main inf luential f acto rs o n o ne’s mindset.
Next, each o f yo ur paragraphs o ught to f o cus o n o ne f acto r at a time. Yo u need to explain and
analyze HOW these f acto rs af f ect the mindset. Grade; 7 Co nsider revising.
6%
SIMILARIT Y INDEX
4%
INT ERNET SOURCES
0%
PUBLICAT IONS
3%
ST UDENT PAPERS
1 2%
2 1%
3 1%
4 1%
Exclude quo tes Of f
Exclude biblio graphy Of f
Exclude matches Of f
Mindsets Paper
ORIGINALITY REPORT
PRIMARY SOURCES
documents.mx
Int ernet Source
Submitted to University of Northampton
St udent Paper
scottbarrykaufman.com
Int ernet Source
gtscholars.org
Int ernet Source
