The Mind at Work

Mike Rose aptly paints of a picture of the cognitive and physical skills demanded of American workers. He uses his interviews with his mother, who worked as a waitress for over thirty-five years. He examines the wide variety of complex and varied skills and intellectual prowess required to complete her jobs. Rose also skillfully uses context in this writing in two ways. First, Rose shows how waitresses' intellectual aptitude lies in an unappreciative social surrounding. Second, Rose enlightens us as to how much unrecognized intellectual skills lie in the job. Although, previous discussions of work in restaurants have admitted the physical and social skills required, Rose feels that the intellectual skills are not appreciated.

The impressive memory expected of waitresses include intense mnemonic skills, sequence strategies for orders, remembrance of spatial layouts and personalities. Rose travels with us from the physical skills and prowess of waitresses to the job's cognitive demands., you can't help but have an increased respect for the mental part of labor as a result. It's well worth contemplating in light of the economy's ongoing evolution and the changing roles of workers.


We, as teachers, should keep in mind the cognitive skills students bring from their outside experiences. Many of these experiences may be much like waitresses' skills, unrecognized as having any intellectual worth by society at large. We need to push ourselves to see beyond both our own, and society's reductive idea of intelligence in order to truly see the mind at work in a new light.

Tangerine Conclusion

In our last class discussion of Tangerine, we discussed two questions:
1) Discuss whether Tangerine is an accurate depiction of the ills of U.S. society
2) Paul wants to enter St. Anthony's as a kid with a reputation. What can you as a teacher/student, learn about teaching and learning from Paul?

I found our first question to be an imporatant consideration for both our class and the students at Freddie Thomas. Trying to grasp how much Edward Bloor drew an accurate picture of American social reality is an important consideration. Our class came to a consensus that, due to class disparity and the gap between rich and poor in our country, Tangerine was largely an accurate picture of the ills of U.S. society. The class expressed some doubts about how polarized and either/or Bloor made class seperation seem. Bloor uses the surreal Florida setting with the developments, muck fires, and Tangerine farms to paint a surreal picture of the two social settings. However, we should not forget that this story is about Paul's personal struggle with identity and family but also about class seperation and the inequity of American life.

The other question that came up in our discussion was how realistic Bloor made Erik and Arthur's characters. In a lot of ways, I hoped for more depth in Erik's character, but it wasn't part of Bloor's intention. Making Erik into a simple, absolute villian was, in some ways, easy for Bloor. Although the story was very powerful, I think it could have brought up even more controversy if Erik wasn't as absolute a villian and was presented as more human. A flawed human who makes terrible mistakes is harder to deal with as a reader than a monster who commits unspeakable evils.