“You’ve got to work for your supper.”

When I was a child my dad used to regale me with lengthy stories that proposed two dominating themes. One was the trials and tribulations of the wicked witch of the west and the other centered on the numerous values of hard work. The wicked witch was like any other good bed time story. It was just spooky enough for me to beg for more so that he wouldn’t leave my bedside, but PG enough that I could still get to sleep. In contrast, his stories on hard work could keep me up for hours on end worrying that I wasn’t living up to some standard he had set for me without my permission or my understanding.

“Amy you don’t know how easy you’ve got it. When I was your age things were a lot more difficult.”

This is how my dad got rolling. I knew I was in for a doozy as soon as these two fateful sentences popped out of his mouth. The stern scowl on his face and the exasperated look of disappointment in a daughter who didn’t yet understand that life was work, and hard work at that, were enough to put me on the defense.

“When I was your age, I had to walk five miles to school across a marsh and through the woods in the worst of weather to get to my one room school house. Do you know what they did to us if we hadn’t done our homework?”

He would taunt me with the possible what ifs and “horror” stories of his youth. It was clear that I was not supposed to take my ten minute walk to school for granted, that I should be willing to do my homework without the risk of capital punishment because he had gone through the worst for me already.

“I want a better future for you so you don’t have to go through things I did.”

My inner-child rolled her eyes. I had heard the same mantra over and over again. What was he really trying to say? All I knew was that apparently my dad’s life had been difficult and traumatic and I couldn’t fix that for him. Hard work was not appealing to an eleven year old who had dreams of performing on Star Search and moving to Hollywood to live with Kirk Cameron. My desire for instant gratification most certainly did not match up with the struggle he proposed as reality.

“Back in the dark ages, we didn’t have TV. I didn’t get an allowance. If I wanted something for myself, I had to work for it.”

And work is what my father was good at. Growing up he was always home last and tired from a long day of crunching numbers at his accounting job. On weekends when we went fishing the experience was mostly work and very little play. I’d ask if we could go swimming at the beach and the response was frequently determined by whether or not we had caught any fish.

“You’ve got to work for your supper.”

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This story only scratches the surface of all the encounters I had with my father on the subject of hard work, but it does speak to the nature of the dilemma. I was a child who didn’t want to hear about hard work and he was a man who knew that hard work was necessary to future gain. In retrospect, I can look at myself as a foolish child. I didn’t get it then, but today I most certainly carry the same cultural values as my father.

My dad’s espousal of values does not give him hero status. I do not believe that he had the proper tools to truly demonstrate why he thought hard work was important. Lecturing me over and over on the same point never gave me the experience I needed to understand where he was coming from. It was only years later when I realized that I too had the capability to work hard and the ability to see its’ benefits that I truly understood what he meant. The key was that I had to experience the concept on my own.

Nonetheless hard work is a value that my culture holds as extremely important. Whether it was my father admonishing me about how easy my life was compared to his or my mother telling me that I had to help weed the garden before I could play. These sentiments were usually in accord with what I learned at school. Despite tracking practices that led students to believe that intelligence was innate, we were never given the impression that school would be easy. In fact my school prided itself on being difficult.

As a child, I frequently joked with my dad that he was a “plugger”. There was a comic in the Boston Globe each day that detailed the life of a dog that always worked hard, but never saw much reward. He just kept plugging away. There was a distinct disconnection between what my father preached and my viewpoint that his own hard work was futile. It was hard for me as an eight year old to see the connection between the endless hours at work “bean counting” and the roof over my head, the food in my stomach, the cleats for soccer practice, and so on. My father did not always enjoy his work, but he did it so that his family could live comfortably and so that I would have better opportunities than he.

The disconnection that existed for me as a child did not fully integrate itself until I was in my early twenties. One might account this to my own cognitive development, but I believe that his education of me could have been done in a different way. Perhaps if I had been able to experience the meaning behind his values, I would have learned them sooner. Similarly in school systems there can be disconnect between preached values and the way that they are taught. Nieto and Bode point to this contradiction as they state,

When schools are not cared for, when they become fortresses rather than an integral part of the community they serve, and when they are holding places instead of learning environments the contradiction between goals and realities is a vivid one. The chasm between ideal and real is not lost on students. (p.139)

While Nieto and Bode are also speaking to the broader contradiction of the education system, I feel their point rings true for my learning. The more “real life” experience there is in education the more connections students can make. Authenticity creates an education worth fighting for and one that students can engage in.

Today my father’s work and message resonate in my life. I have learned through experience that the things I work for mean more to me. I have seen that my education, formal or informal, means more when I take note of the process I went through to get their. As a parent now, I hear myself telling the same stories my father once told me. I regale my step-daughter with stories that start “Back in the dark ages…” just as he did. I try to make sure that she too takes part in the work that goes on around the house. In addition to stories, we try to engage in real life practical applications that show results. Instead of being the authoritarian, I try to be the coach. I hope these skills will benefit me in my future role of educator.

Citation:

Nieto, S., & Bode, P. (2008). Affirming diversity: the sociopolitical context of multicultural education. Boston: Pearson, Allyn and Bacon.

Vignettes from the particular:

What is academic success? How have ethnic minority children faired in my experience?

One night volunteering at Bettie’s Place, a women’s soup kitchen, I passed out crayons and other art supplies to tired, wary children while their mothers hounded me for packs of cigarettes. Interestingly the art supplies had been donated by children from local schools while the sought after cigarettes were supplied by the shelter.

At my college being an ethnic minority meant you were driven, brilliant, and often poor enough to qualify for financial aide. Laura was a gifted and passionate woman. Her scholarship was ripped out from underneath her the second year of college because her family made slightly more than the established poverty line. She was sent packing despite her hard work.

I befriended an eight year old who struggled with his school experience. He often got into scuffles with his peers and had a hard time listening to school authority figures. At home Mark was sweet, curious, and yet sullen. Three years before I met him his mother had passed away leaving Mark, his younger sister Christina, and his father behind. Matt often watched after his sister as dad, the man whom he blindly trusted, made and sold methamphetamines out of the garage.

While waiting tables, I became friends with a Colombian man named Eduardo. We bonded through my faltering Spanish and his supportive encouragement. He always took the time to inquire how I was and I tried to respond in kind as we worked our respective jobs. Eduardo has a Ph.D., but cleans dishes every night.

I met Dante who had given up on every type of institutional system and instead relied on gangs for support. He was one of the most business savvy people I’ve ever met in my life. In spite of huge cultural differences, we became friends. This 6’, 250 lb., heavily tattooed, California gang leader carried on philosophical conversations about respect with little ole’ me. We found a common ground.

A Sudanese family registered five of their children at a local school where I was employed. During recess, we were required to walk around the playground for exercise. Dana the youngest and most vulnerable of the girls frequently needed reassurance and comfort during this time. She would approach me teary-eyed and sniffling looking for a partner to walk with. Her peers didn’t know how to console a lifetime of heartache. Neither did I. We would walk hand in hand slowly and sadly around the playground.

Altered reality: Diversity and my hometown community

In my hometown racial diversity was not a reality with the exception of Monday through Friday from 7 am until 3 pm. Our school system was so economically and ethnically white that only a handful of local college professor’s exotic children could be construed as minorities. Fortunately due to the good sense of civil rights activists in the year of 1966 a program was created that changed the racial climate and make up of many suburban towns in Massachusetts. The mission of the Metco program is as follows:

…to provide, through professional leadership and voluntary citizen action, the development and promotion of quality integrated educational opportunities for urban and suburban students in the Greater Boston community and to work towards the expansion of a collaborative education program with the Boston and suburban school systems. http://www.metcoinc.org/aboutus.htm

In short, every year about 30 racially diverse students hailing from poor inner-city communities would make their way on a long bus ride to my little town in search of better “integrated” educational opportunities. Graduation rates, standardized test scores, and college enrollment suggest that the academic component has been achieved, but I still find myself wondering at what cost to the abandoned inner-city community, and more importantly to the developing identity of each child.

In elementary school, Metco kids were just like any other kid as far as I was concerned. The only difference perhaps was that I wasn’t able to go over to their houses and play after school. Middle school brought greater awareness of differences. My peers from Boston were almost always visibly tired after their 5 am bus ride from Boston. I didn’t know any of the music they listened to, I wore different clothes, and my after school experiences were quite unlike their own. With adolescence came acknowledgment and hyper awareness of these differences and more.

Late middle and early high school brought a new beast: academic competition and labeling. Students were filtered into low, middle, and high achieving groups. While we all struggled to differentiate and integrate ourselves, the school began to reinforce the negative judgments we made upon one another. Penelope was a smart girl and a know-it-all, Jonah was funny, but a trouble maker, Arnold was a little weird and sometimes made people uncomfortable. The school began to separate us off into our future social stratus spheres. Have you ever noticed how all the AP students sit at the same lunch table and the remedial math kids hang out together after school in the smoking corner?

The same was true for Metco kids. I can remember one and only one Metco student I ever saw in any of my AP classes. In addition, she was socially isolated from her Metco peers. While most of the Metco students had their own chosen area, sitting in their own corner of the cafeteria, this student sat with a table of similarly tracked white girls from Wellesley.

I’m not trying to say that this program was bad or that numerous benefits weren’t had by the increased cultural diversity, but rather that our community wasn’t able to behave in a completely unbiased manner. Tracking is one institutionalized mechanism that separated us, but so too did the socialization compounded by our perceived academic levels. I wonder sometimes if coming to my high school didn’t send a powerfully negative message to these young minds. Act white, learn like a white student, and you too might be a rich “white man”, but at the same time we’ll never see you as deserving of AP status.