Help with some upper level questions over a Mike Rose Essay
Hello, I am looking to get some help with some questions that were on my final exam review and I am totally stumped on. They are over a Mike Rose essay called "I just wanna be average" out of his book: "Lives on the Boundary."
The questions are only over 4 paragraphs. So I am only going to include those 4. I have narrowed many of them down. But want to see what you guys think.
Heres the passage, and the questions will follow:
Code:
Students willl float to the mark you set. I and the others in the voca¬tional 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. Dur¬ing 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 abil¬ity 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 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, en¬joyed 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 text¬books 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 av¬erage." That woke me up. Average? Who wants to be average? Then the ath¬letes 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.
Here's the questions.
Code:
“I Just Wanna Be Average”
These Multiple Choice questions refer to paragraphs 11-15.
1. Paragraph 11 contains all of the following EXCEPT
a. parallel syntax
b. a general assertion
c. oxymoron
d. metaphor
e. allusion
2. The rhetorical function of the sentence “But I did learn things about people and eventually came into my own socially” (par 13) is to
a. introduce the accomplishments of the speaker
b. acknowledge that the speaker’s experiences were not entirely negative
c. signal a shift of focus from the speaker’s academic problems to his social difficulties
d. suggest that the speaker was more mature than he realized
e. emphasize the importance of social life in vocational education
3. Which of the following phrases contribute to the image pattern that unifies paragraph 11?
I. “bobbing in pretty shallow water”
II. “a dumping ground for the disaffected”
III. “scuttling along at the bottom of the pond”
a. I only
b. II only
c. III only
d. I and III only
e. I, II, and III
4. In paragraph 12, what point does Rose emphasize?
a. that the teachers in Voc. Ed. Were ineffective
b. that he lacked the knowledge to do more challenging work
c. that his attitude toward learning ensured his mediocre performance
d. that the subjects being taught in Voc. Ed. Were irrelevant
e. that he was bored because he wasn’t being challenged
5. All of the following can be found in paragraph 14 EXCEPT
a. parallel syntax
b. figurative language
c. general conclusions
d. a detached viewpoint
e. specific detail
6. Which of the following best describes Rose’s attitude toward Ted Richard?
a. sheer admiration
b. melancholy respect
c. resentful envy
d. concern and disappointment
e. both sympathy and disdain
7. At the end of the passage, what understanding of Ken Harvey’s statement “I just wanna be average” has Rose reached?
a. Rose is relieved that he never settled for being average.
b. Rose recognizes that he underestimated Ken Harvey.
c. Rose feels guilty for his attitude toward athletes.
d. Rose realizes the sadness of believing that one has little potential.
e. Rose doubts that he was actually any smarter than the other kids in Voc. Ed.
8. Which of the following best describes Rose’s style in this excerpt?
a. descriptive and allusive
b. lively and sarcastic
c. didactic and abstract
d. detached yet detailed
e. retrospective and discursive
Here is also a link to the questions:
http://gosps.net/faculty/WSigler/sig...20Average.docx
and the Essay:
http://gosps.net/faculty/WSigler/sig...%20Average.doc
BEAR IN MIND, MY TEACHER DID NOT MAKE THESE QUESTIONS UP, I FOUND WHERE SHE TOOK THEM OFF OF THE INTERNET. THATS WHERE THE LINKS COME FROM.
Thanks!
