Discuss the role/perspective you want to project to your readers. Do you want to come across as a fellow spectator, someone with personal experience of this topic, an expert on this particular reading, a friendly story-teller, or some other role?

average by Mike Rose

The Audience Analysis. 1.    Audience profile. Describe and define your target audience. Who do you want to reach with your summary/response? Can you define your

audience by age, gender, educational level, ethnic background, or any other criteria? (approximately 2-4 sentences)
2.    Audience-subject relationship. Discuss what your audience probably already knows—if anything—about the topic. What do you expect your audience to already

know about the author or the topic of the core reading? How do you think they would likely react to the core reading? What do they expect from a rhetorical analysis?

What attitudes or biases do you expect in your audience? (approximately 2-4 sentences.)
3.    Audience-writer relationship. Discuss your relationship to this audience. Consider what you may have in common with your audience. Consider whether your

audience will trust what you have to say or not. Are you “one of them,” or are they a group different from you who needs to know something you have to offer?

(approximately 1-3 sentences.)
4.    Writer’s role. Discuss the role/perspective you want to project to your readers. Do you want to come across as a fellow spectator, someone with personal experience of this topic, an expert on this particular reading, a friendly story-teller, or some other role?  As long as you remain consistent, these and many other

possibilities are acceptable. (approximately 1-3 sentences)

The First Draft
Due by the end of Session 5

First drafts consist of the following elements:
1.    A left-hand block header that includes your name, instructor’s name, class/section, and date
2.    A separate title for the paper, centered on the title line and in the same size, style, and font as the rest of the document—not underlined. Use an original

title that suggest your main point or approach (not “Summary/Response Paper”).
3.    MLA or APA formatting, including in-text documentation and a separate Works Cited or References page at the end.
4.    Minimum 900 words for draft stage. (1200 words for the final draft.)
5.    A minimum 200-word audience analysis. This analysis should be posted at the beginning of the draft paper, before page 1 of the actual paper. Use copy & paste

to add your audience analysis to your first draft file before posting. The audience analysis will not be included in the word-count requirement for the draft itself.

The audience analysis must be removed from the final draft that is due in Session 7.

Mike Rose

Mike Rose is a teacher and scholar who, for more than two decades, has argued quite effectively for the real potential of students often neglected and undervalued by

society.  “I Just Wanna Be Average” is a chapter from Rose’s award-winning book, Lives on the Boundary (1989), about the challenges to and potential of underprepared

students. Rose, himself the child of working-class Italian immigrants, argues for the unrealized abilities of many students not well served by our society.  Having

overcome in high school his own inadequate preparation and intellectual neglect, Rose gives us insight into the lives of nontraditional students (often working class

and minority students, ones who have been labelled “remedial”) and helps us reconsider our assumptions about them.

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, ac¬cording to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill Cobb and

Johnny Gonza-les, 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 soul¬ful 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 to¬gether 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 stu¬dent 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

schoolscriticizes 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 oc¬casionally 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?”
“No, sir.”
“Wop!”.
Sophomore English was taught by Mr. Mitropetros. He was a large, be¬jeweled 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 re¬cruit. 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. Mon¬tez 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 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…