High School Student African-American Male Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: My teachers and I definitely do NOT have a lot in common. The only thing really connecting us is that it's their job to teach me and I have to go to class. In my opinion, the biggest divider between my teachers and I are race, gender, and economic background. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Yes. It definitely does make a difference in the relationships that I have with staff at my school. For example, I don't see any of my teachers or staff members as people that I could truly open up to. Honestly, how could they understand me? They're all white women and I am a black male. In my perspective, I have grown up in a different world than my teachers. It's a world that they never had to experience and they never will. The only teachers/adults that would truly understand me and my past experiences would be a person of color but I don't think I've ever had a teacher or color and that's really a shame. Dante is getting ready for college where he plans to study business. He is currently interning with a youth organization where he works with kids to record music and organize performances. He hopes to become a music producer.
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High School Student Iranian Female Heterosexual Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: Most of my teachers have been white women. I have never had a Middle Eastern teacher while in public school, even though I know several Iranian students and an even greater number of Middle Eastern students. However, I have had a few Asian or multiracial teachers. For example, in seventh grade Humanities class, I met my teacher and eventual Writing Club advisor, Kristin Leong. I look forward to casually strolling into her room and asking what she’s working on. From my experience working with Ms. Leong, I’ve learned she loves to fill her schedule with exciting opportunities related to writing, activism, and any of her other interests. I can relate to her love of working on a multitude of projects and to her active character. My schedule is also full of things I love such as starting my own vegan truffle company, yoga, blogging, and writing for Points Living Magazine. My twelfth grade mathematics teacher and I are both interested in health and wellness. She is vegetarian, and I eat mostly plant-based foods. My Senior Project advisor is also interested in health and wellness, and working with her on my senior project on health-food entrepreneurship is very exciting. I appreciate that I share similar political views with some of my teachers. Class lessons about the current political climate have inspired me to write political raps and attend events such as the Seattle Women's March of 2017. I have analyzed the president’s tweets and watched his inaugural address at school. It means a lot to me that many of my teachers also have similar stances on the immigration ban even if they do not share my ethnic background. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Yes. It does matter that students and teachers have things in common. I believe in the importance of student and teacher relationships. For me, it’s easier to create a meaningful connection with someone if we share similar experiences, backgrounds, or interests. This way, teachers become more approachable and the learning material becomes more influential. When I can converse with teachers about vegan truffles, Persian festivals, and poetry slams outside class, I also feel like I can ask teachers questions with less hesitation inside class. Teachers who mention healthy eating in a science lesson or tie in anecdotes about their culture into history lectures also create more engaging and relatable material. Teachers who share backgrounds with students are able to tap into students’ perspectives and mindsets. They can teach in a way that personalizes the information for the students and helps them learn the material in familiar styles. The reason I know about spoken word poetry is that my seventh grade humanities teacher, Ms. Leong, introduced me to it. Because we shared similar interests and personalities, I formed a long-term relationship with her. Many of the opportunities I currently experience developed from that relationship. If I were unable to connect with my teacher in seventh grade, I would not have started Writing Club, learned about spoken word poetry, and started several writing projects in high school. I do not believe I would have pursued these opportunities if I did not have a teacher with a similar character to inspire me. Diversity in the teaching industry is important because it brings new perspectives and stories into the classroom. When I was in elementary school, many of my teachers were my role models. If there were a more diverse range of teachers, students would have culturally diverse role models to inspire them. This would be empowering for many young students who come from many different cultures, which is very important especially at a young age. Niki is currently applying for college while running her company, Rawcoco. To learn more about Niki and her adventures in entrepreneurship, performance poetry, and training for a World Record in planking, or to order her delicious raw vegan truffles, visit Rawcoco.weebly.com. High School Student Chinese + Jewish Male Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: My friends and I don’t necessarily seek out connection with our teachers at school, and some might say we even actively avoid it, but then again, that is kind of normal for students. I feel perhaps a little more common ground between me and my teachers than the majority of kids, because I enjoy writing and performing and learning and creating and many of the things that teachers do every day. I’ve even considered becoming a teacher myself in time, although that’s way too far off to be certain. The reality is that most often times it’s a love-hate relationship that sits between me and my teachers, for at the same time that I admire what they stand for and share so many interests with them, actually being a student in any public school sort of drives you crazy, as you probably know. Worksheets and standardized tests and long essays... I see these traditional methods of dealing with a large number of kids at once like a type of education mass-production, with all the same compromises and artificial feelings of a literal factory, and an obstacle to being able to relate to anyone who works as part of this institution, whether or not they want it that way. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: It matters incredibly much. It’s so much harder to learn from someone who doesn’t understand you. There are ways around this barrier, and as students, we often find ourselves spending most of our time meddling with them: watching tutorials online, learning from each other, taking excessive amounts of notes, cheating, but nothing eases the process like having someone who is devoted to finding what makes your brain click. In my experience this has gotten better and better throughout my school years. We have websites designed to be more attractive to us by interweaving the worlds of social media and academics, and programs to help us form healthier relationships with our peers and mentors, but in the end it’s up to the individual to make it all work out, and the reward for both sides is that we want to learn. It feels meaningful. We want to complete the assignments, not just for our GPA’s and scholarships, but for the sake of learning and growing into better people. Photo (c) 2017 Kristin Leong High School Student Male White Heterosexual Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: We are all trying to get out of this place as fast as possible. Despite the large initial differences seen between teachers and students including race, age, economic status and upbringings; in my opinion and experience what makes the bond between teachers and students tight ends up being much mores simple than one would think. In my experience, it's the attitude of the teacher and their approach to students that really creates a strong relationship, not a "young, hip, relatable" teacher. Even the oldest teachers, with the right attitude have kept it real, and have made class that much more interesting. There's no petty complaining or nagging, it's reality and they understand that kids will either do work or not, and it is really up to the kids to do their work. This ends up making the whole atmosphere of the class more relaxed and casual. In my opinion, this realization is more important than any knowledge that is taught throughout high school. While younger teachers generally have been easier to work with than the older teachers I have had to work with, I have come to the realization that the way the teacher addresses the students, as equals and real people, not children, adds respect into the classroom and allows the students and teachers to be eye-to-eye and have a greater understanding for each other. This helps both teachers and students achieve what they have set out to while being at school. This respect has increased as I worked my way to higher grades, as one would expect with the students becoming more mature. This has allowed me to have more respect for the teachers and the class, and has therefore allowed me to have greater success in their classes. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Not necessarily. While commonalities make it easier for students and teachers to level, it is not needed in order to make students and teachers relate. In suburban Bellevue, at my school, I don't believe that race or sexual orientation plays a huge role in how people are treated in our classes. Yes, there are issues with some people in some places, and no I wouldn't honestly know about how this feels or really know what happens because I am a white, straight male. However, based on what I've seen my with friends of color, or those of varying sexual orientations, they are treated equally by teachers and others at our school. From what I've seen everyone is treated fairly equally and the only thing that would initiate being treated differently was any attitude or work incompatibility that might cause issues between students and teachers. But these can just as easily be seen with any white straight student as with any student that is part of any minority group. Photo (c) 2017 Kristin Leong High School Student Korean Female Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: At my school, it seems like my teachers and I are all busy. We are all busy with school, our families, our responsibilities. Sometimes, how busy our personal lives get impact our school lives, and it seems to be the same for teachers. But it's weird, we lack a mutual understanding of how busy we may all be, even though it's obvious--we all have our own lives. I don't really know my teachers this year on a personal level, so I can only base our similarities on what I can see, and we all have our hands full with many, many things. However, I can recall times in past years when similarities between students and teachers were truly beneficial to my education. When I used to live in California, my kindergarten class consisted of mainly Spanish-speaking students. Because the target language at my school was English, this language barrier would have been extremely detrimental to all my classmates had our teacher been unable to speak Spanish and English. Unfortunately for me, neither English or Spanish was my first language – I was a native born Korean who had just immigrated to the US. Though I struggled to catch up to the language levels of my friends, I was still able to enjoy school as our teacher, who was bilingual herself, was understanding of all our language barriers. Additionally, I distinctly remember my principal and a 5th grade teacher. They were the only Asian staff, one of them being Korean, which really helped out my mom (who could rarely help me with school as she was also native Korean), which helped with my education there as well. One of my first experiences with the American school system truly showed me the importance of having commonalities with a teacher. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Yes! Regardless of how much a student and a teacher may have in common, any similarities can help start a bond between them. As a student, I know that often times, teachers are held up to certain standards and ideals. When teachers are stereotyped as a general mass of people, it's hard to see them as individuals. When that happens, it's hard to even begin to relate with them, let alone have the WANT to relate with them. Because it's so much easier to understand and learn from someone you relate to, having a connection to a teacher is really important. Photo (c) 2017 Kristin Leong |
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