52 New Things -- Week 26 -- Migrant Summer School

I pretty much gave up on the idea of a relaxing summer vacation weeks ago. I took a class all of June, the last class I needed to get endorsed to teach English language learners. (They used to call it ESL -- English as a Second Language -- but then they realized lots of kids were showing up in American schools knowing more than just one language, so the title didn't really fit.)

Before I can wrap the whole thing up, I have to do a thirty-hour practicum. It's kind of like a very brief student teaching experience. I thought I might be up a creek, trying to find summer school in July, but I found a school about twenty miles down the road from our new town that has a summer school program for children of migrant families. Monsanto hires lots of laborers for the summer months to detassle and do other field work, so an influx of Mexican-Americans from Texas arrive in this mostly white Iowa town every summer. The kids are required to go to this summer program so they're not sitting around the camps unsupervised.

I'm matched up with the reading teacher for 7th and 8th graders, and they're awesome. We're reading a book called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It's about a freshman boy who decides to go to an all-white school twenty miles away from his reservation in hopes of getting a better education and having a better life. After talking about stereotypes of Native Americans, we asked the kids if there were any stereotypes they felt people had about them as children of migrant laborers.

Wow.

They had a lot to say about that. Here's a little of what they shared:

1. We are not illegal. We were born in Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana. We're as American as you.

2. We can speak English. We speak Spanish at home sometimes because our grandparents speak Spanish, and sometimes we speak Spanish when we don't want people to know what we're saying, but we can understand everything you say about us.

3. We're not poor. We come to Iowa in the summer because the jobs pay better than the jobs in Texas, but our parents work in Texas, too. We come up here because we're smart about money, not because we're desperate.

4. We listen to the same music you do. Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5 . . . whatever's on the radio.

5. We eat foods other than tacos and burritos. We like pizza and "American" food. But Taco Bell is awful and nothing like what our mom makes.

6. No one in our family owns a sombrero.

7. We don't do drugs and we don't help people cross the border illegally.

8. We don't have ten families living in one house. We do often live on the same block, though. Why would you want to drive three hours to see your grandma? We love our families, so we live close together. We don't just get together on holidays or once or twice a year -- it's more like, hey, it's Thursday and we're grilling, so come on over.

In other words, no one likes to be sterotyped . . . and if you'd just get to know us, you'd realize we're a lot like you. :)