Thompson 1
Ben Thompson
ENG 0100
Ms. Reynolds
5 December 2014
A Different Kind of Intelligence
In his essay “Blue Collar Brilliance”, Professor Mike Rose comments on our short-term
views on the physical strategies of workers performing jobs related to service or manual labor.
Rose complains that stories about working class people generally miss the focus on the physical
loads their jobs require. Rose states that belonging to a certain collective group does not define
an individual’s knowledge (Rose 247). In the life stories he tells us about, his own face to face
encounters are the main source of learning, as opposed to an official education.
Rose has spent most of his life watching workers perform manual labor with much
appreciation. He would occasionally watch his mother, Rosie, and his uncle, Joe, work to their
