03-01-201
As a teacher, Jack MacFarland has become a role model for Mike Rose. MacFarland teaches Rose that those dreams you have in your head can become a reality if you really believe in it. He gives him this idea that if you block out your surrounds and believe in what you wanna do those dreams can happen. As Rose’s comes from a working-class family the dreams of going to college was down the drain for him. But as he says to MacFarland “When I finally said, ‘I don’t know”, Macfarland looked down at me- I was seated in his office-and-said,’listen, you can write.'” This helped Rose broaden his horizon that there is a future out there for him. Just because the people around you might be of the working-class with no higher education does not mean that you can make a difference and go to college and earn a degree. MacFarland teaches Rose he can help to open those doors to the upper-middle-class. That does not necessarily mean what money or job you have. It means something bigger. The upper-middle-class is a place where he is not living on Vermont Ave. a place where his dreams cannot be a reality. He wants to get out in the world and be productive and he gets this motivation form, MacFarland, because before he came into Rose’s life dreams were not realities they were thought in his head. By the end of the story, Rose comes to a realization of what the. future has for him by stating “Within a year or two, the persona of the disaffected hipster would prove too cynical, too alienated to last. But for a time it was new and exciting; It provided a critical perspective on society, and it allowed me to act as though I were living beyond the limiting boundaries of South Vermont.”. He says this because before he had MacFarland as a teacher he could only think of this. future within the walls of his street. Now that he has an understanding of the outside world he believes that he can do anything and does not have to follow the footsteps of his family members.
