![]() ![]() She walked full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand. Rosie took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while fielding questions about the food. Lingo conferred authority and signaled know-how. The racetrack, for instance, was the fast-turnover front section. Her tables were deuces, four-tops, or six-tops according to their size seating areas also were nicknamed. Fry four on two, my mother would say as she clipped a check onto the metal wheel. Standing at the service window facing the kitchen, they called out abbreviated orders. Weaving in and out around the room, waitresses warned behind you in impassive but urgent voices. At mealtimes, the pace of the kitchen staff and the din from customers picked up. There wasn’t much for a child to do at the restaurants, and so as the hours stretched out, I watched the cooks and waitresses and listened to what they said. Sometimes she worked the register and the counter, and we sat there when she waited booths and tables, we found a booth in the back where the waitresses took their breaks. When I was growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, my father and I would occasionally hang out at the restaurant until her shift ended, and then we’d ride the bus home with her. My mother, Rose Meraglio Rose (Rosie), shaped her adult identity as a waitress in coffee shops and family restaurants. New York & London: Norton & Company, Inc.Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (Photo by Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress) Walters (Eds.), Everyone’s An Author (pp. Ultimately, Rose sums up the heart of the matter by urging his readers to appreciate the blue-collar brilliance that he has spent his essay describing because, “This is a model of the mind that is worthy of a democratic society” (para. “When we devalue the full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge” (Rose, para. Perhaps more importantly, he points out why this matters so much. Much more than missing opportunities to acknowledge both skill and knowledge amongst blue-collar workers, Rose argues that society is actually “affect the work creates in the future” (para. By making this statement he indicates that there is an overarching argument that he is passionate about. Near the end of his essay he declares, “If we think that whole categories of people-identified by class or occupation-are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides” (Rose, para. Rose is arguing that we are perpetuating a divided society with the oversight of what he calls, “diverse intelligence” (para. Although he clearly points out that the cognitive skills that these workers bring to their jobs deserve recognition, the author is driving at a broader argument. ![]() paint-and-body department during his 33 years with that company (para. He notes that his uncle Joe’s formal education ended with the eighth grade yet he became a supervisor of a G. ![]() Rose further develops this theme with examples from the working career of his uncle Joe Meraglio. Multi-tasking, memorizing orders, and skillfully handling the diverse emotions of both customer and staff are a few of the cognitive demands that he highlights in her work (Rose, para. Rosie, as Rose refers to his mother, utilized a broad range of knowledge and skills to effectively manage the physical and mental demands of her job. He illustrates his mother’s brilliance in her work by opening his essay with detailed examples of the cognitive demands placed upon her in her waitress jobs. Like the title of his essay suggests, Rose acknowledges the physical labor required of blue collar workers but seeks to refute the “belief that work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence” (para. Mike Rose (2013), in his essay Blue Collar Brilliance, presents a fascinating picture of the varied demands placed on much of America’s working class.
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