Lives On The Boundary

Mike Rose is the author and narrator of Lives on the Boundary, has his doctorate in education, and is currently a member of the faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His work has won him numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Grawemeyer Award in Education, and the Commonwealth Club of California Award for Literary Excellence in Nonfiction. Rose writes Lives on the Boundary in order to dispel the myths surrounding remedial students, and he does so by sharing his own journey from vocational learner to college professor and administrator. To do so, he begins at the beginning. As the child of immigrant Italian parents, Rose grows up in South Vermont, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles. His mother is the sole breadwinner in his family due to his father’s degenerative illness, and a standardized test mix-up lands in him the vocational education program at Our Lady of Mercy High School. Although Rose only spends two years in the program, the damage it inflicts is devastating—he has huge gaps in his knowledge that affect him throughout his high school and early college career. Thanks to the intervention of his high school English teacher, Jack MacFarland, Rose goes to Loyola Marymount University, and his professors there work with him one-on-one to keep him from failing out of college.