Renee Scrybalo

Ms. Thompson
Skinny A/ Day 1
Draft 1

I Just Wanna Be Average/A Talk To Teachers

A Talk to Teachers and also I Just Wanna Be Average have many similarities, as well as
many differences.
In I Just Wanna Be Average, the speaker; Mike talks a lot about different types of
people and touches on race although it is never his main point. He mainly focuses on different
ethnicities. For example, Ted and Ken. Mike makes fun of Ted and says, 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. He does in fact judge them quite harshly, so to me he is really enforcing stereotypes.
Mike shows this in another way when he begins to tell the readers about Ken. Mike says, 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. Hodad is a term used to talk about someone
who is into cars, music, and basically just the average stereotypical white male. I Just Wanna Be
Average focuses on the different types of student isolation and the different types of people and
their personalities. However in A Talk To Teachers it talks more about race and how segregated
everything was back then. You have to account for the day and age also. Back in the day, the race
of certain people was more apparent than normal stereotypes. Baldwin has a more accusatory

tone rather than Mike Rose. Baldwin blames the teachers for a false prejudice view that they give
their students. Mike and Baldwin show some of the same qualities in how they both want to get
their voice out there and state their opinions of the way schools are being run.
Funny enough, both these documents were first out to the public in December 1963. The
1960s were very transformative. The 1960 Civil Rights Movement is a time that African
Americans struggled for racial quality. We can interpret that most likely teachers did not treat all
the students fairly. Baldwin knows and expresses his view on how cruel reality is. He knows how
important education is in able to leading a successful life. As he talks about the importance of
great education he says, to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself. There
is no doubt that the time periods that these documents were published that times were rough, but
people kept fighting and kept doing whatever they could to feel as equals.
Another factor must be taken into account; however. This is the students that are enrolled
in each school and their teachers ability to each them. Each student is different than the other.
Ones ability and willingness to learn can relate to how the teacher teaches and how well the
teacher does their job. Stressful situations and teaching environments can be directly related on
how the teacher is feeling every day. Lets say a teacher has a patient, dedicated, and hard
working class. Most likely then the teacher will be in a better mood. Then we look at the
opposite; a teacher with an interrupting, noisy, and disrespectful classroom the teacher will
probably be upset and stressed out which links back to the teacher being in a bad mood. And it is
quite likely that someone of a different race could be in that bad class, instead of the good one,
and have a much worse learning experience. We see in I Just Wanna Be Average that when Mike
Rose was accidentally put in a lower level class then he was supposed to be in. He can definitely

tell the distinct differences between more advanced and lower classes. The students, as well as
the teachers acted as though they could care less about education.