I work in Southern California. My experience spans classrooms in the slums, where prostitutes peddle themselves after dark, to the million-dollar neighborhoods. 90% of my teaching experience has been with Latino and Asian students. My inner city kids told me stories that made me cry when I got home. There was the boy who had seen his best friend stabbed to death on the kid's own front porch when they were 11. There was the boy whose mother was a drug addict and had once held a gun to his head. The girl who had been molested repeatedly by her cousin while no one would believe her. Those were the kids my heart went out to.
It was harder to feel compassion for the hulking teenager who, rumor had it, had worked with the cartel in Mexico. Let's just say I let him play on his phone in class. There was the kid who played the dirtiest music I'd ever heard and had this soul-less look in his eyes. He was maybe 14 and the parole officer would come to the school to check on him. Let's just say I didn't go to great lengths to get him to get off the roof, and neither did the office admin people. I felt that, should he someday come to school with a gun, I didn't want to be one of his pre-selected targets.
Then, 25 miles north of El Cajon Blvd, there is an entirely different world. It's really almost an entirely different country, too. It is a suburb of primarily Chinese and Indian families whose children are first-generation. It is quite common for my students' parents to expect perfect SAT scores. We begin doing practice SAT tests as early as 5th grade.
These are the kids who won't look me in the eye when they tell me they got a B on a paper or in a class. It's always like I'm at this terribly shameful burial where the corpse is a broken dream. My first summer teaching SAT writing, an 8th grader repeatedly told me that getting bad grades would inevitably lead to homelessness. His parents had been telling him that for a while, and he thoroughly believed it. I'm sure he will never be homeless, however. That would be inconceivable.
My Asian students also introduced me to the real meaning of the A, B, C, D, F grading system:
A - Average
B - Below average
C - Can't eat dinner
D - Don't come home
F - Find a new family
Needless to say, with my caucasian background and liberal arts education, I was horrified and incredulous. The culture shock lasted at least a year. Now, almost 6 years later, it had become the norm. My students are all used to going to school after school. They all have other classes and tutoring sessions and piano lessons and dance performances on weekends and week nights. No one talks about getting a degree in History or Art or Education. It's the next generation of engineers, computer scientists, doctors, lawyers. One student told me privately that she wants to be a philosopher, but I don't think she has admitted this to her parents, yet. What parents want their daughter to be a philosopher instead of a lawyer?
So this has been my world, and I am convinced my students have taught me more than I could ever teach them. This blog is devoted to them and is meant to help other educators with anything useful I have learned.
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