Through what I have learned thus far about education it has become clear me that teachers must have an open mind when confronted with new cultures that might not match their own, or match those of the school, or those of the students within.  I witnessed the exact opposite during an observation of a first grade arts class at an all boys private school.  We were sitting around the arts room working on perspective drawings when one of the boys said something along the lines of “hey dog, that’s not cool!”  The teacher immediately turned to the student and said (again something along the lines of), “Dog?  What’s this ‘Dog’?  We don’t use language like that!  We’re not in the ghetto!”  I was stunned.

My junior year of high school I became a volunteer member of an organization called Helping Hands Noramise (HHN), which was founded after the earthquake in 2010 that devastated most of Haiti. HHN was founded by a Haitian woman who was living in my community at the time, named Rosedanie. She put together a group of 10 volunteers, half were students from the high school, to fundraise and collect donations (money, school supplies, art supplies, medical supplies) that we then proceeded to bring as offerings to the people of a city in northern Haiti, called Limbé. With our multitude of suitcases and bursting with enthusiasm to provide our assistance, our good intentions were quickly curtailed when we landed in Limbé.

When I was in fourth grade, my mother sat me down and warned me of a word. So evil, she told me not even to say it by name, the n-word. She said this word was one of the worst things to be called. Briefly eluding to its dark history and severe cultural implications, she told me not to simply laugh off the use this word. After our talk, I am not sure I fully understood the word and it’s sorted past, but I felt a fear begin to bubble up inside me as the implications of my 'blackness' began to dawn on me. All of a sudden, discrimination was a reality that my skin would never let me hide from.

In my junior year of high school, our grade had two electives to choose from to fulfill our U.S. history requirement. The classes offered were 1) Modern U.S. History (MUSH) and 2) Modern U.S. History - African American Experience. The initial distinction between general history and history from the “African American Perspective” already seemed a little odd to me (and even more disconcerting as I have gotten older). I also felt like it was an obvious choice to take that class as every other history class I had ever taken up to that point was from the white perspective. The class was taught by a white woman named Ms.

I grew up in a very small town in New York, where I attended a K-8 school of about 300 students. Since my town was so small, I wasn’t exposed to very much diversity growing up. Almost everyone I knew came from a white, upper-middle class to middle class, Christian family. In my grade of about thirty people there was one girl, named Angela*, who had severe autism. She was unable to speak and had a helper with her at all times. Angela was at our school from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade and our class grew up with her as a constant part of our lives. Although physically and mentally she was different than the rest of our class, her parents still sought to give her a fun and happy childhood.

When I attended my high school in Vancouver, Canada, I did not think it was “diverse” (specially, racially and ethnically diverse). About 25% of the students were white, about 50% were Canadian-Chinese or recent immigrants from China, about 20% were Canadian-Korean or recent immigrants from Korea, and the remaining 5% were mostly students of Japanese, Vietnamese, and Indian heritage. Despite the pretty big ethnic and racial diversity at my school, I (along with my friends who were mostly white) did not think of our school as diverse. This is pretty mind-boggling to me. It is hard for me to understand how I could have been so off in my conception of diversity. Looking back on it now, I see a possible reason for it.

I am a Korean adoptee. I was adopted at five months by white parents, don't remember anything about it, and don't care to try and find the person who gave birth to me. I get a lot of questions from people who feel entitled to hear our story, but I don't mind that much-- the average person doesn't know much about the adoption process in America. It's a good teaching moment.

One evening during my freshmen year at Haverford, my friends and I went to the Dining Center to eat dinner.  We ate and talked about our days as usual, but our conversation took an unfortunate turn.  My friends, who I regarded as generally aware and sensitive to multicultural issues, began commenting on the group of Chinese international students sitting next to us, who were speaking in Chinese.  They made comments ranging from insensitive to xenophobic like, "I don't understand why they are speaking in Chinese.

It seems a bit silly, even now, the idea that your life can be changed, simply because you read a book. That doesn’t seem like a normal things to happen to people, I mean most of the other kids in my class didn’t even do the reading. I did, I always did. I grew up in a town that no one would ever call Diverse, let alone multicultural. I grew up in a sea of white, welsh, cisgender, deeply Methodist, photocopies. They all looked, walked, and talked just like me; that never changed, and no one seemed to ever want to change; generation after generation.