First Visit to the Village

This entry is not about the health care system, but after walking into the pediatric care room at Valley Medical Center, I may have found the Achilles’ heel of the American education system.

I opened the door to the waiting room – an overflowing harbor of families. A Latina mother sat in the hub of nearly every cluster of children. The ambient din pulsed with the ritmo of español. In the foreground, a familiar face swung into view just as I turned the stroller past the doorway. “Antonio” had just graduated from the high school where I teach, and he was a student in my very first SDAIE English class.

SDAIE was an exhilarating challenge in my teaching schedule last year. The students, all of them members of immigrant families and several born outside the United States, were leaving the modified, immersive English Language Development classes and transitioning into the “mainstream” (I hate that word) English department. The SDAIE class is that transition – a bridge from the ELD program into the English classes. (If the cleavage of these two disciplines – English for Immigrants vs. English That The Rest of Us Speak – strikes you as contrived or even absurd, está bien. The more I reflect on this separation, which is a gaping chasm in many schools and districts, the more ridiculous it appears. Look for that blog later.)

Antonio greeted me warmly. His younger sisters were hesitant and shy at first, but they beamed with infatuated curiosity for Jeri and Nora (both Latina, by the way). I introduced my foster daughters and set up camp next to the family. Of course, as I’m starting to head towards the registration desk at the other end of the room, both girls decide it’s dinnertime. Suddenly, I’m in flailing octopus mode. One arm attempts to cradle and balance baby Nora, nestling her head in my elbow while my hand curls and contorts to bring the bottle to her lips. Her rock-a-bye-baby spine teeters on my bicep while my right hand tosses spoonfuls of puree and Cheerio-sized veggie snacks to the stroller-free Jeri. I’m feeding the one-year-old like she’s a goat at the petting zoo.

Once it looked like the girls had enough food, I tucked Nora into my torso as any running back would and resumed the long walk to registration. Jeri immediately begins to fuss, then without prompting or pretense, one of Antonio’s sisters picks Jeri up and places her on a knee. The touch was gentle and the motion effortless, and this twelve-year-old I had never met was comforting my child in the same soothing tone my mother or my wife would use.

In that moment, several things could have given me pause – the sister’s generosity, her audacity, her innate skill at putting Jeri’s mind at ease. But I couldn’t waste this opportunity between outbursts, so I pushed forward to the desk.

Then the other sister stops me. She has a quick exchange with her mother, who seems to be trying to stop the girl from addressing me. Too late, this one (maybe ten? eleven?) is unabashed and undeterred: “My mom doesn’t want me to say this, but she wants to know if she can hold the baby.”

I met the mother’s stare. Her gaze needed no translation. She wasn’t asking if she could help me out a hapless husband with his hands full. No, she wanted to hold the baby. She wanted to feel the blessed child’s weight in her arms. She observed Nora with deep reverence. She wanted to love her – physically transfer affection and honor from herself into Nora. This mother knew the weight of her request; I think she half-expected me to say “no”. I gave her the child.

As I fiddled around with the registration person, sifting through this and that form, Jeri slides off her lap of residence and starts casually sauntering to me. A shoe falls off, but Jeri keeps marching forward. Without missing a beat, another mother gently catches Jeri and sweeps her up. This woman then gropes for the fallen shoe and graciously replaces it on the child’s foot, all the while playfully muttering in Spanish, telling Jeri it’s just silly to walk around without her zapatos.

This was when I paused. Jeri arrived at my feet; I picked up my child and looked out at the cluster of Latina nests. The borders blurred, however. Jeri was wearing the shoes replaced by a stranger while another stranger softly caressed her sister. And yet, there was no sense that she was trespassing. All of these Latina women embraced her, embraced us, embraced me the moment we stepped into their village. We were welcome to stay as long as necessary, and my children would be comforted by the ancient nurturing impulse of the madres throughout our visit.

I instantly understood why Latino students typically struggle so much in our schools. When was the last time you saw a high school that felt like a village?

The American education system obsesses over individual achievement. Each student is ultimately judged by the scores, grades, and credits that s/he earns from their fundamentally solo efforts. The diploma sits at the end of a lonely journey and rewards only those students who have honed their skills according to the school’s standards. Even the college application process focuses on finding the right campus to suit the individual’s character. There are many group settings within the academic environment, but consider the small student groups created in class against the school’s teams that assemble on athletic fields, in chess and marching tournaments, and so on. The student’s responsibility OUTSIDE the classroom is to help the team win, but as soon as a teacher frames a group assignment the same way, we know the first question to be asked: “Will the group’s work affect my grade, or am I graded on my own efforts?” Can you imagine the starting pitcher asking the baseball coach if he will earn high marks for his performance even if the team loses?

The village culture of the Latino embraces communal values much more than individual ones. Identity is shaped almost exclusively by the relationship and role one plays within la familia. The development of a person is measured largely by their ability to contribute to and respect the larger group. How can a student raised with these expectations, this definition of what being an adult represents, possibly reconcile this world view with our schools? Moreover, could we possibly conceive of how our schools might emulate this model? A student walks in on the first day, and the teacher explains: “Your grade will be determined by how well you help the class as a whole. It makes no difference whether you can perform the algebra yourself. If you cannot enable all thirty-eight student to be successful, your grade will suffer.” Imagine how the tests would look in this class! No more silent, isolated bubbles for each person to fill in their bubbles. Desks would be shoved together, students would be chatting about the questions, swapping ideas and answers with nary a care for who was watching. If the state-mandated exams were administered this way, you could imagine the agents of test validity descending from the ceiling on ropes in a full-on raid.

I’ve heard many a math teacher on my campus decry this practice, even on homework, and ever since I began teaching SDAIE, I’m noticing more and more students of color linked to those accusations.

The teachers call it “cheating”, but the view from the village is very different.