my name is karel. i'm 26 years old and reside in portland, oregon, although i'm from the east coast - new jersey and new york city, specifically. currently i'm a graduate student in school counseling. i have numerous artistic pursuits, including writing, graphic design, jewelry design, and knitting. (although i'm actually quite bad at knitting.) i have a failproof weakness for chef boyardee beef ravioli.
portland blog - my boyfriend brian and i document our adventures out west
sunshower design jewelry - my handmade jewelry business
scrawl - password-protected site for my writing (email me for access)
pdx hoods - coming soon!
frustration
future
living
pop culture
school
self
September 2009
October 2009
November 2009
December 2009
January 2010
and now, to get moralistic Labels: frustration, school, self
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
One of my classes this term is called "Effective Teaching," and in it, we're learning about a teaching method called Tribes Learning Communities (TLC). Essentially, the idea is to build a community atmosphere in schools and draw away from the traditional classroom setting (students in rows facing the blackboard, teacher at the front of the room, lecturing, etc.) as the world changes around us. Sounds cool and idealistic, right?
That's because it is. In one of the chapters I read today, an administrator and long-time Tribes trainer told a story about a misunderstanding she had with a student who was from a culture that was different from Western, American culture, and different from her own culture. Through reflection and research, she came to understand where the discrepancy had been, and this became a great life example used to promote the incorporation of Tribes into more schools.
I couldn't help but feel reminded of a particularly heart-wrenching experience I had in my last job - one that I never wrote about, but always meant to - that still angers and saddens me months later. As you may know or remember, I last worked for a Mandarin Immersion Program in a public elementary school in Portland. The student population was probably around 50% Chinese, and I'm estimating that about 15% of those kids came from households where barely any English was spoken. Their parents worked blue-collar jobs in the Chinese community (shop or restaurant owners or workers) and really didn't need much of a handle on English to survive here.
There was one student in particular who stood out to me, mostly because he was almost late for school every day and I would see him scurrying from his mom's car into the school as I waited for the extremely tardy bus to arrive during bus duty. Also, he wore classic Asian-kid clothes (you know, matching sweatsuits with vinyl animals and other sorts of patterns on them, or hand me down track pants and a Cosby sweater) and I thought he was so cute. Anyway, because of my station in the main office, I learned pretty quickly of a disciplinary situation that came up one day involving him: he had been selling things to little girls in his classroom, and when the girls' parents found out, they were upset. Rightly so.
The problem, though, was that this child (we'll call him J) was not 'fessing up to anything when questioned by the principal. He would just sit there and stare at his lap and cry, and when pressed repeatedly, he would lie to her and say what he thought she wanted him to say. Yes, his parents knew he was selling these things. No, he had not kept the money. (Where did it go? That question was never answered) These incongruencies only frustrated the principal and caused her to add more allegations to his referral - not only had he been exchanging money in the classroom, but he also lied - and it was decided that J ought to be suspended for the rest of the day.
For a suspension, a parent or guardian needs to come in and have a meeting with the principal before taking the child home. Because the principal didn't speak a word of Chinese, I was asked to sit in on the meeting as a translator. I didn't think much of it going in, but after it happened I was so thankful to have been there for that family, because what happened in that office was a quietly distressing example of underhanded ignorance that I had not expected to witness.
Imagine that you are J. You are six years old, and your parents, extended family, and pretty much your entire community is Chinese - just like you. You primarily speak Cantonese at home, but your parents have also taken measures to make sure you learn Mandarin, and you spend half your school day in Mandarin class and the other in English class - but you also get pulled out of class a few days a week for special English and reading classes. One of your teachers looks like all of the grownups you know, but one of them doesn't. Most of the grownups in the school don't. The principal doesn't. The six hours you spend in school a day are pretty much the only interaction that you have with white people, and half the time you're not quite sure what they're saying to you because they're talking so fast in English.
Then you get in trouble in class and get sent to the principal's office. The principal is a large white lady with a stern look on her face who keeps pressing you to tell her what you did, and when you are too frightened of her to answer, she only gets sterner and meaner and tells you that you can just sit in the office and wait until you're ready to talk to her. Except you are so uncomfortable and intimidated in the presence of a white, English-speaking adult that the only words that come to your brain are in Chinese. Her English words start to not make that much sense to you, so you can barely even nod in response to her questions.
As I sat in the principal's office with J, his mother, and the principal, translating to J's mother the best I could, I could feel J's fear creeping out of his little head and clouding over the whole table. His mother talked to him quietly in Mandarin and Cantonese, and he replied to her quite easily, but when he was asked to repeat it to the principal in English, he would stutter. And I watched as the principal responded to him in the same way she responded to the repeat offenders who showed up in her office day after day. The white kids, who didn't see her as a foreigner, speaking a language that was still halfway unfamiliar to them. She treated J just like she would treat anyone else in her school, but the simple truth is that he isn't like "anyone else" in her school. Roughly 15% of 50% of the kids in her school aren't like "anyone else" in her school. Their home life looks completely different from the home life she knows. They have a different view of authority. They have a different view of white people. Many of them fear white grownups, simply because they are not exposed to them for much of their lives, and what little exposure they might have could be ignorant or discriminatory behavior toward them and their family. That's the simple, ugly truth.
I suppose I generally have a more forgiving nature than many adults toward children, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only thing at play here. J definitely deserved to be disciplined in some way, to be taught that what he did was a wrong choice. But he didn't make that choice out of spite, nor anger, nor any ill intention. He made a silly mistake, and was then intimidated into making another mistake of lying. He wasn't spoken to at his level, in his culture, nor even in his native language - and none of those factors were taken into consideration in the assessment of his reactions. I was so beaten down coming out of that meeting, and I hadn't even been the one in trouble!
I had a chance to speak with J before he left school that day. I didn't want him to leave without hearing something from a grownup who spoke his language, looked like him, and wanted to understand him. He told me that he had been frightened of the principal, and that he hadn't quite understood everything she was saying to him. I asked him if he knew what he had done wrong, and he said yes, but he didn't know why it was wrong. When I explained it to him, I stayed on his level and framed it as a teaching moment, not a punishing moment. He was able to look at me and really hear me, and while he was still very shy and withdrawn, I could tell that he felt much more comforted and resolved.
This story and all of the emotions that it brewed up in me have stayed with me since that day, and although this is the first time I'm writing about it, it's not the first time I've told it. It doesn't really feel any better to tell it, because I know it's still happening. The principal is still at the school, that population of Chinese immigrants' children is still there, and inevitably some of them will end up in her office on a first offense and feel scared, intimidated, maybe confused, but worst of all, unsafe. And that reflection that I mentioned above, the one that I read about in my textbook, the one that helped the administrator understand how she had completely misread her student - that isn't happening. The resources, the will, the intent is just not there.
It's episodes like this - and there were quite a few during my year at the school - that reaffirm my desire to enter the school counseling field. Issues of multiculturalism and diversity are simply ill-handled in many public education systems, and although I'm just one person, I hope that I'll be able to make some sort of impact, somewhere. And soon.
