I recently compared Malcom X's "How I Learned to Read" to the first two educational narratives I blogged about. But, as it turns out, I was supposed to compare it to a different narrative, titled "I Just Wanna Be Average" by Mike Rose, so I'll do that, too. First of all, I simply cannot stand the writing style of Mike Rose. Being forced to read entire novels written like that was single-handedly enough to make me detest high school English classes at times. The sheer amount of completely unnecessary details that turn one sentence worth of significant information into one page just irritates me. Perhaps I'm too pragmatic but I really don't care that his Spanish I teacher was short, for example. He's not even relevant to the story; he doesn't actually need to be mentioned, and the fact that he's short certainly doesn't need to be there. Details are great, useless details not so much, and a saturation of useless details is horribly annoying to read. I learned more relevant information from a single page with constant spacing from Malcom X than three pages with no spacing from Mike Rose.

That aside, the message in both narratives is very similar. Both had inadequate educational opportunities, both were inspired to make the most of it and became successful in their endeavors. They differ in that teaching yourself literacy in prison is not quite the same as attending some Catholic school, but the results are certainly comparable.