Concluding Post: Fitting in to Social Norms, School, and Place in Society

           

           Most children want nothing more than to fit in with their peers, especially in school. Being different can make children an automatic target for often negative or cruel treatment from their classmates. Children can be “different” because of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or special needs. Peers can be quite critical at any age, from elementary school up to college. Schools and teachers have a responsibility and the privilege to help guide students to be accepting and empathetic to all types of people. One way teachers can do this is to weave awareness, acceptance, and kindness into the curriculum.

            In Mona Lisa Smile, Julia Roberts plays a first year teacher who lands a job teaching art history at her first choice school, Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The year is 1953. The student body is fairly homogeneous; it is made up of all white, conservative, intelligent young ladies from wealthy families. Roberts’ character, Katherine Watson, comes from California, is unmarried, and more liberal than the student body and school board. Her students initially give her a run for her money; they have already read the entire text and memorized the names, artists, and dates of all the paintings she shows on the first day of class. They chide her for coming from a state university and imply that she is not smart enough to actually teach them anything. Miss Watson leaves her first class feeling defeated. For the following class she shows them modern paintings that show some grotesque images. This gets the students talking about what is art, what makes it good, what makes it bad, and who even approves that something is art. The students seem disturbed that their teacher changed the syllabus on them and she responds with, “There’s also no textbook telling you what to think. It’s not that easy, is it?” This is a metaphor that runs throughout the whole movie. Roberts’ character starts opening them up to thoughts and ideas out of their social norm. She starts these new thought processes through curriculum in her classroom and it eventually takes hold for her students in their personal lives.

Cultural assimilation is very important in this community and Roberts’ character starts to question that concept. This does not go unnoticed by the school board whose members are made of up the principal, other teachers, and alumni. They immediately start giving her warnings about teaching modern art and creating too personal of relationships with her students. It is not only the adults that are like this, but the students, too. Kirsten Dunst’s character writes a scathing editorial in the school newspaper about the school nurse who prescribed a student contraceptives (which was illegal to do at the time) and gets her fired. Julia Stiles’ character is a brilliant student who finds that she gets into Yale, a top law school, where only five spots are held for women. In the end, she chooses to be a house wife because that is what she is supposed to do. There are courses on etiquette; how to stand up and sit down at the dinner table, the proper way to hold your wine glass, and what to do when your husband’s boss invites other employees and their wives to your home for dinner at the last minute. During my sophomore year in high school, my family and I lived in a very small town in Pennsylvania. I was one of five minorities in the whole town and felt very out of place. My home economics teacher tried teaching us some of these same concepts and I remember feeling like I was in an alternate reality. Most of the other girls in class were into it and all I could think was, “get me outta here!” The girls in the movie are often unkind to each other. They tell a character who is on the chubby side that she will never find a boyfriend or husband because she’s too big. They ridicule another character who is experienced beyond her years in terms of her sexuality. They look down upon that same character because her parents are divorced. Roberts’ character tries to show the girls that not everybody has to fit into this perfect box that society says they should.

She opens their mind by incorporating modern ideas into art. She takes them to see a Jackson Pollock painting. The students initially think it is just scratches and paint splashes on a canvas but she tells them to stop and look at it – that is their only assignment for the day, to look and consider it. They stay for a while. She shows them contemporary art, which the students tell her are “just” advertisements. They are advertisements of women holding cleaning products lovingly to their face, women getting measured by their husbands for the appropriate ironing table height, and women “feeling free” in the right girdle. The students are shocked – some look like they have been slapped in the face. They start to realize that there is not just one path that they must follow. There are many other paths that can be explored. The movie ends with Dunst’s character, who has gotten married and tries so desperately to pretend that her marriage is okay all the while knowing that her husband is cheating on her. She files for divorce and moves into an apartment with a classmate, who her mother frequently calls “a New York kike.” Roberts’ character, though invited to come back for a second year with the stipulation that she will teach strictly the curriculum, turn in lesson plans for approval, and keep only professional relationships with her students, decides to leave Wellesley.

As we know, movies and TV that have to do with teachers can often be filled with stereotypes. Same can be said for this movie. Roberts’ character is a first year teacher who thinks that she can change the life of all her students for the better. She goes up against the system and in part accomplishes what she wanted to do. Then she leaves the school never to return again. She is almost like a myth. Many movies, like Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers show the young, white, suburban woman that goes to the inner city to “save” the poor, sad, black children. This movie shows that same woman who goes to a stuffy, snobby school to show those students that this is not what life is like for everybody. The latter part of her story does fill the “movie teacher’s” stereotype, but I do not believe the former part does.

I, too, remember being a first year teacher on my first day teaching second grade in an inner city school of Detroit. I was petrified. I had no idea what I was walking into but I really did think that I could change the lives of all my students. One important aspect of school is social mobility. This means providing students with an educational advantage for more desirable, social positions in the work place. Schools in inner cities do not provide their students with equal opportunities for social mobility than compared to suburban schools. As I walked into my classroom I saw a bullet hole in one of the windows, walls with layers of dirt and student desks and chairs decades old, and barely any materials. My students could barely read three letter words, loved yelling “shut up” at each other, could barely add numbers together, and I cannot even talk about the poor writing skills. On top of that, some were living in shelters, many being taken care of by someone other than a parent, one that had been sexually abused by a family member, and a couple kids born addicted to heroin and cocaine. I tried my best, but working without books at an appropriate level, no actual writing curriculum (I did have a math TE and enough math workbooks for each child), no materials to teach science or social studies, and no support services to meet the students’ emotional needs, I feel as though I did not teach them much. I spent most of my time teaching them things that would be considered null curriculum, which is what is not taught in schools or what is left out of the curriculum. I taught them how to talk to one another and how to resolve conflicts using their words instead of pushing and shoving, none of which shows up on any standardized test. Not having a writing curriculum actually turned out to be a blessing. I was able to teach them whatever I wanted. So we learned the foundations of writing; proper grammar, conventions, how to write a story with a beginning, middle and end, opinion writing, etc. I did better my second year there. I learned how to pillage through unused classes to find math manipulatives, books and other supplies. I started teaching using the workshop method; Daily Five for reading, writer’s workshop, and how to make math more interesting than just doing problems in a workbook. My first year experience is different from Miss Watson’s experience because of the socioeconomic status of the students and families, but the outcome we both want is the same. We want to make a positive difference in the lives of our students. Now, I am entering my seventh year of teaching (wow!), I have a more realistic goal that I strive to achieve. I want to teach each student to the best of my ability, instill a love for learning, create positive relationships with them, and mostly importantly, let them know they are loved. I know that I will not be able to reach each and every child, but strive to reach as many as I can. I create relationships with students and their parents that last longer than the nine months they are in my classroom. My first class of students in Farmington are fifth graders now and there are a few students and their parents that I still have a great relationship with. That is what I want; for a child to know that even though I may not be their teacher any more, I am still here for them if they need me. And if I can reach even a few of those students who have difficult and unfortunate home lives and help them climb that social mobility ladder, that is what I hope to accomplish.

There were many parts of the movie that I was able to relate to even though I have a different ethnicity and culture than the characters in the movie. There are cultural assimilation and social mobility factors in the Indian community as well; things that we are “supposed” to do and ways that we are supposed to live. The girls in the movie knew their job was to get an education, get married, become a house wife, bare their husband’s children, and take care of their family. That is what everyone did. Indian children grow up knowing the blue print of their life as well. We are supposed to graduate high school with top honors, go to not just any college but a respectable one, become something that makes lots of money (preferences are doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, finance, and business people), marry someone who is also in one of these fields, and have babies. Not only is that what everyone is supposed to do, but we are supposed to keep moving up in terms of financial status; keep getting the raises, promotions, and perks. I suppose I am like Roberts’ character when it comes to the path I took. I did not graduate high school with top honors, I did my undergrad at Oakland University (not that respectable, in case you were curious), became a teacher (also not that respectable), and married a white guy who got his higher education degree from MPI (the Motion Picture Institute). I did not want the life style I saw so many people from my culture having as I grew up. I did not and still do not care about the half million dollar houses that they all seem to have, multiple luxury cars parked in the driveway, and fancy, all inclusive vacations all around the world multiple times a year. Granted, not every single Indian family is like that, but most are. This was not an easy path to follow. I came across many hurdles which usually came in the form family members telling me I should not be a teacher because they do not make a lot of money, aunts and uncles, and even some cousins telling me not to marry my husband because life will be “hard” for me with all the cultural differences, not to mention what the community will say. Six years into my marriage, one child, and one child on the way (due February 1^st!), I am very happy with the choices I have made. I think nothing is more respectable than having a hand in educating the future generation, I love my husband and my “normal” sized house, my “halfsie” child (My sisters and I like to refer to him as “halfsie”. I think the politically correct term would be multiracial), soon to be children, and our non-luxury car and SUV parked in the driveway.

Differences in the classroom should be celebrated instead of ignored or brushed to the side. Think of Richard Rodriguez. He assimilated to his new culture which had everything to do with assimilating to school. He started speaking English at the request of his teachers and ended up forgetting how to speak Spanish. He spent so much time reading book after book, he began to distance himself from his family, which I would argue was unintentional. He became more confident as he was able to participate more in school. When he was younger, his home, speaking Spanish, and family time was his security. Now, being so much more assimilated to the culture of the school, none of the things that used to bring him comfort and security do anymore. As teachers, we have to be aware of the “changes” we are asking our students to make or our views that we intentionally or unintentionally portray upon our students. The nuns should not have asked Rodriguez’s parents to speak only English to their children at home. We know now the benefits of knowing more than one language and how important it is to continue practicing whatever a child’s home language may be. It is important for teachers to embrace the differences they have in their classrooms, not try to get everyone to be the same as everyone else. My seventh grade science teacher asked us one day how many of us spoke a different language. I lived in South Florida at the time and went to a very diverse school, so many hands went up. He asked what languages we all spoke and then just randomly throughout the year, as he was teaching, he would stop and say, “how do you say ____ in your language?” And all of us that spoke a different language would tell him. It had nothing to do with the curriculum but it was just this small acknowledgment and validation of the differences in his classroom, that I still remember it so many years later.

I think of the different backgrounds of students I have had in all my classes. A couple things I always do are one, make sure I pronounce a student’s name the proper way (accent and all) and two, make it a goal to learn about the culture or religion if I do not already know a lot and bring their culture and experiences into the curriculum, whether it be in reading, writing, or math. I do this as an acknowledgement and validation of their differences, just like my science teacher had done with us. My personal experiences in school have made me very aware of the differences I have in my classroom. My goal is always to make students with differences feel comfortable, welcomed, and appreciated because I know what it is like when those differences are not appreciated. These are things I want to do as a teacher, what I would want my children’s teachers to do for them, and how I feel that human beings should be in general.

References

Flinders, David J., Noddings, Nel, Thornton, Stephen J. (1986) The Null Curriculum: Its Theoretical Basis and Practical Implications. Curriculum Inquiry, 16 (1), pp. 33-42.

Labaree, David F. (1997). Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34 (1), pp. 39-81.

Newell, Mike. (2003). Mona Lisa Smile. United States: Columbia Pictures.

Rodriguez, Richard. (1982). Hunger of Memory. New York, NY: Bantom Dell.