This story is about a well educated white women going to an area that has gangs, shootings, and prejudice. In this personal narrative, Marni Asplund-Campbell comes to a school with teenagers that live underprivileged lives. She had three questions: why, how, and what to teach. With each question, Asplund-Campbell came experienced change with the students and within herself.
What became her first concern. What to teach? Knowing the circumstances of the lives of students she decided on intolerance. Many of the students that she teaches have seen and dealt with intolerance. Having intolerance towards others, and other being intolerant of them.
How to teach them? How can I ask students who work graveyard shifts to pay the rent, whose mothers and father are crack addicts, who know that there is a better than good chance they will be dead by twenty-one, to care about literature, about writing? Clarifying the motives for the teacher and the students.
Why? She has the students read Night, which is about a man's experience in a holocaust camp. She knows that the things that the students have seen and experienced have felt similar and unjust. The students find similarities with intolerance. Afterward, the students thanked the teacher. It helped them open their eyes and think more about their lives.
This is story is similar to the movie Freedom Writers. A well educated Caucasian woman enters a culturally diverse high school filled with many students who suffer from prejudice and intolerance. Then the teacher presents materials that the students relate to. Then the students began to change and become more attentive and they participate more. The teacher finds reason for her job and through some internal conflict, so finds her reasons why.
I think that this narrative does well to show that you can't really thrust the american dream on those children locked down in the ghetto, and that it isn't feasible to "empower" students from these areas and lifestyles. What hope it does give comes from the fact that the woman is still able to get the students thinking, to urge them to think more deeply about the injustices and hardships they face. It's a story of a moderate success in the projects that hasn't been dramatized and glorified by hollywood, and i think that there is truth that can be gleaned from her story.
ReplyDeleteThe entire time I was reading your response, I was thinking about how much this section related to "Freedom Writers," and then there you went and pointed it out yourself! I love stories like that, but I couldn't help but think that the book was WAY too inappropriate for my personal liking, and the students didn't learn too much education-wise, though they did learn how to become more motivated and hard-working and stuff. It's these kinds of stories that help use to realize that everyone has a chance at changing themselves for the better, and that if we but encourage and lift others, we can be a great help to those around us.
ReplyDeleteTo bring in a gospel perspective, it is like the parable of the olive tree. We are all placed in different circumstances, some better than others, but we can all repent and learn to get out of those circumstances if they are not good for us. Everyone can change with the right people to help us.
ReplyDeleteThese kinds of stories are so inspiring to me. The people that have enough dedication to really look for ways to relate to those youth. Those people are blessed in the eyes of the Lord. You can always see their effect :)
ReplyDelete