A wild Rose in bloom
When L. Todd Rose dropped out of high school, he had a 0.9 GPA. He had a pregnant girlfriend, was living in small-town Utah, was making less than $5 an hour, and was subsisting on welfare checks. You wouldn’t guess that now about Rose, who is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Education. He pokes fun at his windowless office, a scant, boxy room, lit with unflatteringly buttery bulbs and a corner table. It looks like the kind of room in which you’d interrogate a criminal. And Rose knows it. He almost became one. There was that incident in seventh grade, which established Rose as a force in his small-town community. While the art teacher turned his back to the class, Rose fired off six stink bombs at the blackboard and earned a suspension — one of many. Those stink bombs, along with his forays into petty vandalism, and pushing his...