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Mike Rose is our guest blogger during the week of August 17th. If you have any questions for Mike Rose, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about The Mind at Work, Possible Lives, and Lives on the Boundary:

The Mind at Work

As did the national bestseller Nickel and Dimed, Mike Rose's revelatory book demolishes the long-held notion that people who work with their hands make up a less intelligent class. He shows us waitresses making lightning-fast calculations, carpenters handling complex spatial mathematics, and hairdressers, plumbers, and electricians with their aesthetic and diagnostic acumen.  Rose, an educator who is himself the son of a waitress, explores the intellectual repertory of everyday workers and the terrible social cost of undervaluing the work they do. Deftly combining research, interviews, and personal history, this is one of those rare books that has the capacity both to shape public policy and to illuminate general readers.

Possible Lives

"This big-shouldered book, full of ardor...offers us a reasonable hope that with attention and care we can again make public education what it was meant to be, and must yet be."-The Los Angeles Times.

Lives on the Boundary

Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient-these are the stigmas that define America's educationally underprepared. Having grown up poor and been labeled this way, nationally acclaimed educator and author Mike Rose takes us into classrooms and communities to reveal what really lies behind the labels and test scores. With rich detail, Rose demonstrates innovative methods to initiate "problem" students into the world of language, literature, and written expression. This book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of a wide range of students.  

About Mike Rose

Mike Rose, a member of the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, has written a number of books and articles on language and literacy, including Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared. In 1997 his book Possible Lives won the prestigious Gawemeyer Award in Education and the Common-wealth Club of California Award for Literary Excellence in Nonfiction.