| --I'm writing this because it is an Academy assignment, but I always feel more inspired to write when I write on here. Before moving here, I had always heard that moving into the inner-city would be good preparation for overseas missions. I even gave that as one of the reasons that I was considering moving here. People talked about how it puts me in a different culture, but still in my country, where I can speak the language, so its easier. I heard all of these things and even claimed to subscribe to the same ideas, but I did not come close to understanding what that would/does mean for me now. I am the type of person who needs to understand people in order to interact with them. For the first few encounters with you, I just read you, trying to figure out what you need and how to best interact with you so that you accept me. Because of this I get very frustrated when I cannot figure out how a person would react to this or that, or their thoughts on this or that. Living in the inner-city and working with the people that live here have been hard for me. I usually gage how people will react based on my prior knowledge and interactions with people. This year I find myself interacting with people who are nothing like people that I usually encounter, therefore, I have nothing to base how I interact with them off of. I don't know how they will react because I don't understand them or where they are coming from. Oh I want to understand, I try to understand but I just don't. For a while I blamed the differences on race and began drawing the lines based solely on skin color. After a while, though, I began to realize that it has nothing to do with that, yes, the lines may appear to be as simple as the color of our skin, but they are really much deeper and stem from the cultures in which we grew up. I began to be astonished at how such different cultures with such different ideals and goals could live next door to each other and not understand one another at all! There are many examples from my year working with parents, students, and fellow teachers from this different culture, some are about very trivial things, such as what words are appropriate for children to say, but some are much deeper, like disciplining children and the role of parents in a child's life. I found myself thinking that my way was superior and of course their's was wrong. I teach kindergarten. In my kindergarten class we have the normal discipline problems of any other school. Once during the year, I noticed that my students were having a lot of trouble telling the truth, they were just lying. It was such a problem, that I felt it necessary to discuss it with the whole class, talk about what lying is, how to deal with it, etc. When I began talking about it with my students, they began to say things like, "Miss Kristin, we don't say that word," or "Ummm, Miss Kristin said the 'L' word." This confused me. I later found out that in lots of homes in the community, the word lie or lying is considered a bad word and children are not supposed to say it, the way to address the problem is to say, "they told a story." When I first heard this, it really bothered me. I didn't want to say that the student told a story, because they weren't telling a cute story about a bear or something, they were lying, and lying is wrong. I wanted them to understand the seriousness of it. For a while I resented it, but tried not to say lie for the sake of my student's parents. I began to notice other things though, for example, student's in this community say the word butt, but children where I grew up were not allowed to say that word. There really is no real reason why butt would be a bad thing to say, but that is just the way it is, so it is accepted. I realized that I don't always have things right and there are just as many things in my culture that are messed up as are in theirs, I'm just used to mine, so I don't always see them. I have to understand that we are equal, even if we are not the same. I am no better just because of the culture I was raised in and the priorities and ideals that I hold. I now know that the only way to face this is to just admit the differences and try to see the other side of things, admit that I don't understand, ask someone to help me try and just go with it. It is still very hard and I daily get frustrated with things that I don't understand about my student's lives, but the only way to understand is to stick with it and try to learn. To be continued... There is definitely a racial issue in Memphis that needs to be addressed, but I am not brave enough to be the one to do that. |
