Overall, I enjoyed reading the Children of Immigration book this week. The book does an excellent job at bringing up the challenges that immigrant children deal with as they progress through school and life. It gives various perspectives of the children themselves to connect the various statistics to the real world.
The main thing that I found interesting was the statistic that immigrant children and children of immigrants are over represented in both the highest and lowest levels of achievement. It makes me think about the kinds of pressures that those students are put through on a daily basis. Pressures to assimilate compete directly with pressures to maintain the old culture. Combining this with the sometimes dangerous areas that immigrants end up living in, it is amazing that they are able to focus on school work at all.
The book also brought to light the fact that I, as a future teacher, need to be very aware of stereotyping that I may otherwise not notice. Even things that I would not be consciously aware of, can be perceived by the individuals to be negative. Even "good" stereotypes can lead to an overall negative reaction. Not much of the information in the book struck me as counter-intuitive, however I don't think I would otherwise think about the topic as deeply as this book allowed me to, which is extremely important to do from time to time.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI liked how you pointed out the statistic that children of immigrants are over represented in both the highest and lowest levels of achievement. This was also something that I thought about while I was reading. The first thing that I thought about was an episode of Glee that I watched (I think the only one that I’ve watched). In the scene, the father is being hard on his son because he got an A- or an “Asian F.” Obviously this is just meant to be harmless and all in fun, much like the scenes depicted in Modern Family and other shows are meant to be. It is important to note the tremendous pressures that these students are on. Many immigrants and children of immigrants are pushed so hard because their parents know how valuable a good education is. They may not have had the opportunity to go to school and some of these children will be the first one in the family to graduate high school. As a teacher I hope I can sympathize with these students and understand the enormous pressures that they are under both inside and outside of the classroom. Thanks for bringing that part of the reading up!
The bimodal distribution is very common for immigrants and very relevant to Asian immigrants as well Matt. You'll especially see this in the reading of the Model Minority where Asians are perceived to be associated with higher achievement. As teachers we will have to be vigilant about what is taught both openly and in the "hidden" curriculum that students get from daily interactions from students and teachers alike.
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