In Class/OutClassed

One or the Other

I grew up in a middle class home with a family who believed that I was destined to be great. With that set predisposition, I was placed on an assembly line of the public education system and before I knew it I was already separated from the other students. My ideas were in more demand than the others and I was marketed to the adult audience as gifted unlike all the other kids who were marketed to their fellow classmates as cool. Luckily, my parents didn’t neglect my artistic side and I didn’t have a problem with making friends unlike all the other nerds. Once again, I was separated from another group of students and I began to be a rare commodity. But I wasn’t the only one transforming; the environment around me was too. Every time I moved onto the next level of education, the student body became more diverse. When I reached high school, all the products of Battle Creek Public Schools collided with each other. We were then packaged and labeled over the four years. This was our last stop before we were all shipped out to the colleges and jobs. 

Hi everyone!  I'm new to serendip, but as we talked about yesterday in class, I've uploaded my map of education.  I added it as an attachment to this post, so I'm pretty sure you'll have to click it if you want to see it.  If there is anything you can't read or have questions about, feel free to ask :)!

Kamila, Age 1: Sleeping without mommy, school of crying

Kamila Age 2: Potty training, school of hello kitty mini toilet seat

Kamila Age 3: Eating without getting anything on myself, school of sage old person aka grandma

Kamila Age 4:  First plane ride, school of mommy's lap

Kamila Age 5: learning english, school of mommy

Kamila Age 6: adding and subtracting, school of candy

Kamila Age 7: pretending my halloween costume didn't rip during the halloween costume parade, school of life

...

Kamila Age 16: How to drive, school of worried father and 

Kamila Age 17: How to pretend that I love learning about the same things we learned about on college tours,

school of senioritis.

There are many milestones missing but only because those were my VERY active years. Everyday I learned something new. As things calmed down, the learning process slowed down as well but bigger things were explored, life skills. School was my place for learning theoritical things not practical things, thus I have no major memories of it.

When I looking back my educational experience, I am not surprised to find that I spent most of my time sitting in the classrooms and listening as carefully as I could to every word the teacher said. Yes, I learned a lot from various kinds of lectures delivered by teachers and successful people, however, for my educational autobiography, I wrote a dialogue happened between a street cleaner and his daughter, which I consider as one of the most important lessons that I have ever had.

The conversation between the father and the daughter provided me with a great opportunity to redefine success. Now in my perspective, success has nothing to do money and fame, it is something with personal contribution. Some people, especially those from lower-class, have much less resources and opportunities than most of us, and therefore it is nearly impossible for them to move up to the upper class. Of course they are not the “successful people” according to the traditional definition. But, they are still making their own contribution to the world: clean the streets, for example. As a matter of fact, a meaningful life does not equal to a successful life

When I first started to write about my education, I automatically knew that I wanted to write about some of my education outside of the classroom and school, partially because I feel that that part of my education has shaped who I am as a person more than my education within the classroom. I also feel like we have the semester to get to know each other within the classroom, but not necessarily as individuals around and off campus. (Even though, I know Anne is only one who is reading our papers as of yet). After thinking about what I chose to write about, I now wish that I had included a few more things that were central to my education growing up so I am definitely looking forward to the rewriting process for this paper.

For my educational background paper, I chose to write about my experience as a child who has a parent in the military and how that has affected me both positively and negatively. Initially, I was planning on writing about how I have struggled a bit to accept who I am through my educational experience; I have been to many schools where there hasn’t been much diversity or people who look like me. I have often found myself mixing in/blending with either my caucasian friends or my African-American friends and isolating myself from my race. But once I got to high school and opened my eyes to all the diversity that surrounded me, I then realized the importance of embracing one’s ethnicity and race and not just “mixing in”.

When I wrote my educational biography, I chose to write about my experiences as an ESL student and my suspicion that it may have contributed to my loss of my native language. I wasn't planning to write about it initially, in fact, I think I was just frustrated at the moment. I'm convinced I'm having an identity crisis. I reflected on my experiences with assimilation into American culture despite being born as a U.S. citizen. I also ended up talking about the racial makeup of my high school, how it affected my own education, and I'm starting to realize how different it was there from how it is here now. Until this essay I hadn't really realized how many sacrifices my parents have made in order for me to receive a good education.

I wasn't sure what the topic would be for my essay on my educational experience until we did a little bit of reflective writing in class on Thursday. I ended up focusing on the difference in education between myself and my cousins because I realized we really did have quite different experiences from one another (particularly because they live, literally, on the other side of the world!). It wasn't until I really began writing, though, that I understood (or at least, acknowledged) the extent of our differences. In the essay I focuses on their social education as compared to my more book-centric experience. I'm still unsure which of us found more use in what we learned.