My book was
about the International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, New York.
It is a school specifically designed to teach English to immigrants. The book
tells the stories of multiple students in the school, how they got there and
where they are going, along with stories about how the school worked to help
these students reach their goals. It follows them through one school year with
flashbacks to how their came to America and other important times that have
lead up to their being students at International High School.
Disruptions
Reading
this book was an eye opening experience to put it simply. I spent a few weeks
reading it and often when I wasn’t reading the book I was thinking about the
high school students it tells about and how I as a teacher will soon encounter
students like them! It was a sad book though because it wasn’t all happy
stories and I think that was the most troubling part for me. One of the most
disturbing stories for me was about a student, Jessica Tan, who immigrated from
China to come live in New York with her father. Her father, however, had
married a Chinese American citizen to get his own citizenship and had two sons
with his new wife so when Jessica arrived in America her step mother refused to
let Jessica live with them. She was turned out of her father’s home at age 17.
She eventually moved in with her step aunt and uncle but had no guardian living
with her as she attended high school, trying still to fulfill her dream of
going to college. It was so sad to read about this smart, hardworking girl who
was left behind by her father essentially because he finally had boys with
Jessica’s step mom. The cultural pressure that boys were better than girls was
being enforced in her own life. It made me angry to hear of a father doing that
to his only daughter, and even though the book mentions her father trying to
make things better – he never invites Jessica to live in their home. Eventually,
Jessica had her happy ending when she went to college at a university in
Philadelphia, but this was not the case for most students.
Another
female student from Burma, Chit Su was introduced as a new student at the
beginning of the book. She also was 17 years old but her schooling had been
disrupted when she spent a few years in a refugee camp in Thailand so she was
enrolled in the ninth grade. It took her a long time to learn enough English to
adequately communicate with her teachers but by the end of that year she was
wanting very badly to stay at International High School, but her mother who
lived in Texas while working told her she needed to come to Texas to work. The
teachers begged her mother to let her stay till the end of the school year, but
when the school year ended Chit Su and her family all relocated to Chicago.
There she was forced to work and go to a school where they placed her in
twelfth grade, but she quickly fell behind socially and academically and
eventually she dropped out.
It was
really hard to read some of these stories and realize that despite what we may
do for these students as their teacher, there will be times were it won’t be
enough or where there was nothing we could have done. Another example of this
is when a student Genesis Pozo from Ecuador gets pregnant with twins in the
middle of the school year. Not long after she made this announcement her grades
started slipping and her school attendance went down near the end of her senior
year. She was unable to graduate with her class, but when the book ended she
was studying to take her Regent exams to graduate.
I also
found it extremely disturbing to realize my own white privilege as I read this
book. I had easy access to public education and I didn’t have to worry about
being deported. This book even talked about some of the schools in New York at
the time not having an ESL program, they weren’t even trying to accommodate
these students who had traveled so far and been through so much just to get an
education. There are so many things I receive simply because I am a part of the
dominant culture! And what makes this realization worse is that I know there
were times I wasn’t grateful for those opportunities I had or times when I
thought that my life was hard – that it was unfair. After reading this book I
see that this is obviously not true about my own education and now I am more
excited to help make education more accessible for these students.
Application of
Concepts
This book
showed a lot of real life applications of many terms and concepts we covered in
class. Obviously, it was an immigrant school focused on teaching students
English but there are a lot of other topics the book covered that are examples
for different terms from class. The biggest example in the book is the idea of
cultural capital and social capital. Cultural capital is defined as knowledge
of a certain culture’s values, language, and appropriate actions. Social
capital is defined as relationships within a culture, a sort of status according
to who you know. This book was a great example of immigrant children not having
cultural capital when first coming into this country. Their cloths were not in
style, some because they couldn’t afford it but some honestly didn’t know. Without
a basic understanding of the language it is hard for these students to function
well. One example is a Chinese student who didn’t know where the cafeteria was
so he didn’t eat for the first month of his freshman year because he couldn’t
communicate efficiently. But this is a fairly common occurrence at
International, with kids struggling to even introduce themselves in their
earliest days at high school. The faculty even had to teach their students
about prom through a play preformed by the drama club in preparation for the
American tradition’s introduction at the high school.
We also see
examples of social capital in the way these students are introduced into the
American culture through their teachers. International High School assigns
students to an advisory professor who not only helps them with school but also
with assimilating into the American culture. Another staff member is Dariana
Castro, the special programs coordinator, who helps seniors find internships in
their fields of interest as a networking specialist. She is actually from the
Dominican Republic and understands the kids and their current experiences on a
very personal level, so she became the role model and confidant for a few of
the students in the school.
Another
concept from class was the working class – the class of people who usually work
industrial or laborious jobs and often live in poverty. Dariana explained “It’s
easy for our kids to get jobs – sometimes it’s easier for them than it is for
the kids of privilege but our students’ exposure to work is often to jobs where
they are exploited (Hauser, p. 165).” Often due to their undocumented status,
these high schools students worked at fast food places or salons in poor
conditions, with one boy named Mohammad Bah being forced to burn and sell illegal
DVDs to pay his roommates back for rent and food. Mohammad talked about
spending all night burning DVDs for no pay before he enrolled at International.
Another
major concept we covered in this class that was perfectly illustrated in this
book was the push and pull factors that bring immigrants to America. Mohammad,
the student mentioned earlier, was 14 years old when he first came to America
first as a visitor to a church in Connecticut and later an illegal immigrant when
he ran away from the church members. He wanted so badly to stay in America so
he could go to college, become a doctor and go back to his home country of
Sierra Leone to help people there. His want for a better education in America
is considered a pull factor that caused him to immigrate to America. There were
many other students who came to America with the same goal including Jessica
Tan and Yasmeen Salahi. Some students, however, like Ngawang Thokmey from Tibet
were trying to escape dangerous political situations in their home country to
come to America. Ngawang rode in a suitcase in the back of a car for over 13
hours to escape out of China in the first part of his journey to America.
Political unrest in China and other countries like Burma and Sierra Leone
pushed students from their countries to come to America for a better life.
Impact on Me
Reading this book was definitely
an enlightening experience for me. Before this book, I definitely was a little
unsure about how fair it was for undocumented immigrants to be allowed into our
education system, taking time and resources from actual citizens. But to read
about actual students who just wanted so bad to go to school and have some of
the opportunities that American children have really had a profound impact on
me. Who am I to decide who deserves what? I think every child deserves love and
help from me. As a future teacher, I may be the only connection they have into
American society as social capital and the resources I can provide for them
will be priceless!
I want to
be like the teachers in the book who are so invested in their students that
they give the school a second-home feel, especially for those students who are
separated from their parents like Jessica Tan and Mohammad Bah. I also learned
from this book that while students may have similarities in their appearance
and their teenage tendencies, each one is different and has individual needs.
Some students may need a nudge in the right direction while some students
academically excel but they may just need someone who is willing to be their
advocate. I loved reading about Dariana working with the young Muslim girl
named Yasmeen as she prepared first to become the legal guardian of her younger
siblings after both her parents died and second when she needed help
negotiating the agreement for her arranged marriage to her cousin. Without
Dariana, Yasmeen would likely not have gone to college or even stayed in
America after the death of her parents.
I have also
learned from this book that I need to be prepared to do some research so that I
can close the gap that may exist between my culture and my students’ cultures.
Some of the teachers at International knew their students, their cultures and
their religious beliefs so they could protect the kids from ridicule in the
classroom and so they could appropriately interact with them. The teachers at
International were also prepared to help their students learn the cultural
capital they needed to live and function in American society, and this is a new
goal of mine. Teachers can have such a great effect on their students’ lives
and I am not sure that I truly understood that before reading this book. Yes, I
knew that I would hopefully help them come to love biology, but I shouldn’t
limit myself to just encouraging the love of science. I can be a positive role
model and ambassador to American society for my future students.
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