Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared
by Mike Rose
The kids school labels remedial are not dumb.
For you if
you've seen a smart kid get written off by a label.
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Mike Rose was sent to the vocational track in a Los Angeles Catholic school by a clerical error, and what he learned there, and from the teachers who noticed him, became a life's work. He tells his own story alongside those of the working-class and immigrant students he later taught, and argues that the kids schools label 'remedial' are usually brighter than the labels say. The system sorts them, and the teachers who believe in them change everything.
Where This Book Lives
A teacher's memoir and an argument about class and literacy, first published in 1989 and still taught in education programs. It pairs with How Children Fail, The Shame of the Nation and Teacher Man. It is an honest book about the work of teaching, and it names the teachers who made the difference.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Most Likely to Succeed(2015)
dir. Greg Whiteley
Same themes: Education Critique, Education Inequality
The best case for project-based learning, with caveats.
A year inside High Tech High, a San Diego charter school built entirely around project-based learning instead of standardized instruction, following two classes of ninth graders.
Why it’s here: Makes the most vivid case in documentary form for project-based learning over the standard model — but its history of how American schooling got this way has been disputed by actual education historians, and its producers have their own stake in the reform it's arguing for. Worth watching with that critique alongside it, not instead of it.
Where to watch: Streaming on KanopyLetterboxd ↗
A Room with a View(1985)
dir. James Ivory
Same theme: Class and Privilege
Choosing passion over propriety.
A young Edwardian Englishwoman, kissed once in the Florentine hills by an unsuitable free spirit, returns home to a proper engagement — and finds she can't stop wrestling with what she actually wants. Adapted from E.M. Forster's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its gentle insistence that following desire is itself a political act against Edwardian repression. Pedagogical in showing how class convention polices romantic choice as much as any law does.
Where to watch: Streaming on Kanopy, HuluLetterboxd ↗
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Aké: The Years of Childhood
Wole Soyinka
A colonial childhood, one question at a time.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
Richard Ovenden
Knowledge was always the target.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
How to Be Black
Baratunde Thurston
A self-help book that takes race apart.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Know My Name: A Memoir
Chanel Miller
She took her name back from the case.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
The memoir that made the closet visible.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Stamped (for Kids)
Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi
Unlearning racism, one page at a time.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire
Classroom meets liberation front.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Losers Club
Andrew Clements
He loves reading. He hates reading club. He starts his own.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST