Love

Growing up, I was exposed to immigrants in two distinct settings: my hometown's university and the workers in my neighborhood. Many of our family friends were professors or students at one of Missouri's state universities, and a majority of them were from India. As a child, I grew up with their customs and traditions. Dinner parties always consisted of traditional Indian food, and we went to most of the cultural events for our town. I understood that our family friends were immigrants, but that didn't mean much to me. They were some of the smartest and hard working individuals I have met. Around the time of middle school, I moved from the small college town to a bigger suburb of St. Louis with well manicured lawns and matching houses.

Hill’s Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life piece raised many points of interest for me in terms of my work at my placement. He discusses the importance of “appealing to the experiences, cultural orientations, values and worldviews of students in order to effectuate greater educational outcomes… [and the need to] make explicit connections between students’ everyday knowledge and the demands of subject-matter learning.” (Hill, 8.) This reminds me of the importance of engaging students’ diverse “funds of knowledge” in order to affirm their innate knowledge based on lived experiences and utilize this as a springboard for conversation, contemplation, and success in teaching and learning.

**In my post, I use the term "we" to represent today's society.** Dehumanization of the opressed in our country seems to be a common theme for marginalized groups. We give people an undesirable lable, "prisoner," and then assign that label to an entire population. Once we've clumped enough people under the umbrella of negative stereotyping, we can forget about their needs and move on with our lives. This injustice is even more oppressive when we also take control of the group's destiny. Controlling where they can go, what they eat, and how long they must remain in their opressive position-with prisoners, we not only dehumanize, label, and dictate their lives, we also starve them from emotional stability.