Rising to the occasion .

The texts we've been studying that focus on school, were very interesting. I must say my favorite is "I Just Wanna Be Average" because of its story telling and his use of personal experiences, with minimal clouding of the facts. Rose wrote about how students will rise to the occasion; the standards a teacher sets of their students are what the students will come to. I agree with his argument in theory, many students do rise to the occasion, but not all. For example in our school, we have plenty of amazing teachers - we better with our size - and yet there are plenty of kids who slack simply bcuz they don't want to put in the effort. But when Rose mentions his teacher McFarland, that's where the real solution is for these kids. A teacher they can respect and genuinely like. The feelings of disappointing someone who means a lot to you is possibly one of the strongest feelings one can have. If a student honest respects a teacher, letting them down would feel terrible, so the student does their work out of respect. 2 million minutes came from the other approach, it wasn't the teacher's responsibility, it was the student's. The contrast shown was between Asian countries and ourselves in the US. While I understand, much more emphasis is put on school work, mostly math and engineering studies, but this video portrayed a very biased argument. They took top US students and portrayed them as slackers, only showing them with friends and never actually doing their work, while they showed the kids from china and India always cooped in their room doing their homework and never with their friends. In America I think we focus more on being well rounded rather than excelling in one spot, those people are more valued and usually more successful.