Visitors are stunned when they walk into our school at Christmas and see Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and four shepherd boys standing perfectly still in the atrium outside of the Media Center. After all this is a public school.
This year I added a Christmas tree. It was decorated by Thai Her, a 6th grade Hmong student, who had never decorated a tree in his entire life. He begged to decorate this one. Thai is very short -even for a 6th grader - so the lights and ornaments mostly covered the bottom half of the tree. The true Christmas Star was the bright smile on Thai's face.
Jesus and Mary were two 8th graders and the shepherd boys were mostly my library helpers and a few other carefully chosen for their promise to stand perfectly still for two hours.
Jesus was the only problem. Mary handed the baby back to me. "That's not Jesus, Mrs. Mann."
I have the same problem every year. I shop carefully at Toy R' Us for a black doll and every year he is handed back to me. Jesus is not supposed to be black.
I explain that Jesus could not be a blue-eyed, fair skinned child considering the place he was born. He most likely looks more like the people who own the party store down the block. Eventually they accept my black Jesus.
Last year our Art teacher, a very devout Jew, complained that our Christmas nativity doesn't represent her faith so I encouraged her to put up her own holiday decoration.
I also asked our bilingual teachers, Mr. Kue and Mr. Vue, to do the same.
Neither did.
Our school is 90% African-American and 10% Hmong. The Hmong are a group of recent immigrants from Laos wherere they are mostly farmers and their adjustment to the east side of Detroit has been a challenge. They are a group of students who are rarely a behavior problem, and are rarely absent or tardy.
Their parents don't speak English but they come to conferences. At Osborn High last years Valedictorian and Salutatorian were both Hmong students.
Does culture matter? Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.
I don't believe my annual live nativity would work at most suburban schools. But here our largely African-American culture is comfortable with religion and are not afraid to display their faith. We have gospel choirs and we often pray at school events.
But I don't think the biggest culture problem is the color of Jesus or the fact that my Hmong students raise chickens in their Detroit backyards. The biggest problem we have is our culture of violence and culture of failure.
My students are very bright but they don't challenge themselves and we don't challenge them enough. We accept mediocrity at all levels of education - school board, administration, and our teaching staffs.
Violence permeats the lives of my students. How can they focus on school when the walk home is perilous? Or life at home at often a dubious proposition.
I think this is a problem that is frequently buried under MEAP scores and endless testing.
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4 comments:
Yes Marge, you are so right about the community embracing the faith. One of my dear friends, who has been teaching about as long as you, prays for the students all of the time. The parents even come to pray with her! I was shocked when I witnessed this, because I thought that she would get in trouble, but she never has.
I have a Jehovah's witness student again this year and they are very adamant about not celebrating holidays. I'm not a big holiday person myself so it's cool. My six-year old students always discuss God, Christmas and Easter during class and gee I just can't ever seem to stop them.
I also worked with several
Asian students during student teaching, but sadly the diversity seemed to have decreased since then. Nice going lady and bless those future actors and actresses of yours that can stand still for so long. Wow?
Marge,
Once again common sense prevails. I admire your courage to follow your heart and head with respect to cultural displays and the act of respecting differing views. Nothing galls me more than agnostics, self-righteous, and the merely ignorant who take great pleasure in making sure no one can indulge in cultural displays.
I also believe that there is room for everyone in the "melting pot", that is Public Education today.
Brad :-)
Marge, I understand your dilemma. I think we all have to make an effort to bring diversity into the classroom. The kids I deal with have such shallow minds and one-way thinking. I have to remind them ALL THE TIME that there is a big WORLD out there and the "D" is a small insignificant, tiny part in it. Like you, I try to teach them to be open-minded about people, faith, religion, race etc., but it ain't easy. I commend you Marge for taking a step towards multicultural diversity issues.
When I taught lower elementary I went out of my way to expose my students to several different cultures. The student population was African American and the teaching staff was diverse. I had more opportunities to discuss and answer questions about cultural differences. My students loved to talk and they always asked good questions when we talked about the differences.
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