My Elementary School Blues

Whenever I remind fellow colleagues at my high school about the elementary school that some of us formally attended, I am usually met with utter shock when I disclose the fact that I hated our school.

While I often find myself reminiscing about youthful times when I was not stuck taking numerous AP courses, involving myself in multiple extracurriculars, scrambling for internships, ignoring the misogynistic caterpillar in the White House, and taking extra college courses and standardized tests, I often reply with a passive aggressive, “Well that wasn’t exactly the experience for me but I’m glad you enjoyed it!” but what I really meant was “Well you feel that way because you’re probably privileged and white, and male if you haven’t felt disrespected by our school district’s dress code.” I was eyed down by my principal in 6th grade while waiting in the lunch line because my shorts did not abide by the dress code since they were about 5 inches above my knees. I was not formally dress coded during this occasion, but was told by the principal that this was a “friendly reminder”, although it was more of a menacing reminder as it suggested that there were seriously males aged 11–14 and possibly teachers who would be distracted by my attire, which is highly disturbing.

I come from a middle class family of 1st generation immigrants to the United States; my parents are from the Dominican Republic and Japan. After having spent 10 years in the East Coast as a family, (8 years of which I endured) we moved to the Bay Area of California. The larger county where we reside has a relatively homogeneous political and racial climate ーwhite liberals, with the exception of a small Latino community. However, there are provinces and towns within our county that are slightly conservative, which is made evident by the lack of a push towards ensuring diversity and equity within school programs, councils, and events. In addition, a strict dress code geared towards disciplining young girls still exists for the elementary and middle schools in these smaller towns, the way I see it: a support of rape culture.

On the first day of third grade, which was my first year in my Californian elementary school, many of my fellow peers were fortunately very pleased to meet me.

“Where do you come from?” the kids ask.

Understandably, I do look a little exotic. I am a half Asian and half Latina,, but most people believe that I look more Asian than Latina, or at least assume that I identify more with my Asian culture than Latin, (which is untrue, I lost my Japanese after about age 4 but still feel comfortable immersing myself with Japanese culture, and can speak Spanish after having studied the language for 4 years) and have long, wavy hair, which is not exactly the paragon of Japanese beauty standards (or Asian for that matter).

I replied back with, “I moved from New Hampshire,” ーa true statement.

“Oh, New Hampshire!” the girl exclaimed, but a confused guise was found on her face. “What language do they speak there?”

I was flabbergasted. I didn’t know whether the appropriate thing to do next was to simply smile and kindly say “English, New Hampshire is on the East Coast,” or ask the class if anyone was wearing a robe tied up with pins so that I could use them to gouge out my eyes as the tragic hero Oedipus does in Oedipus Rex so that I would be physically unable to view the corruption in front of me, a student who was a product of America’s terrible education system and ignorant racial ideals. Surprisingly, I went with the former decision, but was still greatly confused as to why this girl didn’t know what a fellow state of the US was, even as an 8-year old, when the “Fifty Nifty” state song was all we sang for the past three years in school. Needless to say, this same girl declared that “New York City” was inside of “Hollywood”, the latter being a city within our own state, which continued to greatly confuse me. Additionally, my fellow students still wanted to schedule playdates with this girl so that she could complete their homework. Unless these students wanted to purposely fail the third grade and repeat the year, then their playdate proposals were completely nonsensical. On the other hand, repeating the third grade may have taught them that preaching an individual who didn’t know that the United States’ official language is English, and that California and New York are on two separate sides of the country is equally nonsensical.

Now, it wasn’t only this girl who simply didn’t understand basic geography or respect other cultures.

Rossi v. Room 34 occurred.

I got into an argument with the entire rest of the class (I wouldn’t be surprised if the teacher was in opposition against my belief) because I disagreed with a student’s idea that California was not a state, but a country. Sure, perhaps this student could have had some brilliant plan to create an amalgamation of aligned places in California to fight corruption in our world. However, political curiosity as the stem of this student’s comment is truly the last reason I believe this student made the comment, as students in my class repeatedly told me that I was not Japanese, but simply “Asian” (I understand that I am Asian, but I’m undoubtedly also Japanese…), students blamed me for not being able to engage in Christmas-related activities in my class because I was “Jewish” (I am not, and once they realized that the push towards secular activities were due to the fact that there was in fact a practicing Jew boy in our class, they started to harp on him, which is slightly anti-semitic), that any other Asian kid’s parents in my class were also my parents (sure, we are all humans and related with that logic), that my rice lunch was “disgusting” as compared to, of course, their sloppy, oil-dripping, highly caloric, dessert-like lunches probably found on howtobeobese.com, that anytime the word “Mexican” was said it was completely hilarious and the appropriate time to burst into laughter, and that squinting altered one’s DNA and somehow made them completely “Asian”, among multiple other ignorant instances, which carried on throughout middle school.

The comments made against my race that I described were made by kids between the ages of 8 and 11, a time where these comments can only be seen as “ignorant” and not fueled by pure racism. However, these comments continued throughout middle school, and other remarks made by fellow teachers and parents regarding race were certainly racist, and could unfortunately influence their children and students to make similar comments.

One day, in third grade, an old white woman walked into my classroom during Storytime, and exclaimed in front of the entire class, “Hi everyone! I’m here because there’s someone in this class who doesn’t speak English at home…”

At this point, I sighed and chuckled to myself and thought, “Ha? What if that were me?” hence all of the random comments that were made about my race.

The woman continued to say “So I’m going to help her learn English…and her name is RINA!”

This was a very humiliating moment in my life, I almost cried as the speech teacher clearly ostracized me from the rest of the class, and made me seem less “American” than them. It was true that my mother indicated that my first language was “Japanese” on my school enrollment sheet. (This wasn’t exactly true that Japanese was my only first language, because I had also spoken English as a baby, and carried on speaking English with my parents all of the time after that). However, it was also true that my mother also indicated that I could speak English (fluently), and my near-perfect standardized English test scores, exceptional reading fluency, and conversational English skills used in class were all clear exhibitions of my fluency in the English language, because I was fluent in English. This experience did not occur at the beginning of the school year where my teacher was unable to see these skills that I did in fact possess, but a few months into the year where these skills were beyond evident.

As I walked into this woman’s office, I was perplexed as I was immediately met with the faces of many other multi-ethnic students sitting at tables with standardized tests in front of them with angry, humiliated, dull expressions on their faces. The students were moaning, “Why do we have to do this? We know how to speak English!” The kids were miserable.

The speech teacher told all of us to begin the test. The test contained questions “as complicated” as pictures printed of inanimate objects such as carrots or pencils, and test takers were required to write the noun that correlated with the object shown, requiring less effort than the work Donald Trump puts into bettering America. Clearly, the test was ridiculously easy for me to complete, but it still was unfair that along with being absent from my third-grade classroom for multiple days, I needed to receive personal tutoring from the speech teacher.

My parents were the only ones who attempted to terminate my participation in the program. My teacher passively watched the speech instructor embarrass me, and pose bilinguality as negative. My teacher knew that I excelled in reading and writing, and was fluent in English, but did nothing to help me. No one did. I obviously never expected any of my fellow classmates to help me escape the English learning class of Hell. It wasn’t any of their business, and advocating for something that doesn’t affect oneself is a very mature concept.

I am aware that my teacher, and fellow staff members probably did not have a legal right to petition against my needing to take the English Proficiency Test. But, the fact that my principal continued, year after year, to allow these tests to be administered to anyone who indicated that they speak a non-English language at home, without perhaps instructing teachers to investigate whether the child was proficient in English, angers me. My proposal for teachers, principals, and adults is to be aware. Be aware of that some of the legislation that the school district is unfair. That some rules favors a certain race. That some don’t preach bilingualism. Research the legislation you as a school district preach to students. Question legislation, question yourself, demand not only changes in legislation, but changes in obsolete teaching methodology that allows discrimination, don’t be nice, don’t be polite, neither be rude, but be truthful to your idea of change, because failing to do so leads to racial insensitivity, and ignorant comments about race towards youth. The youth are our future, the youth are the seed to the huge plant we call society. Water these seeds with diversity, open mindedness, curiosity, and the world will see all the change.

Related posts:

Learning a new coding language can be daunting, stressful, and lonely. How would I know? Well, in 2015, I attended a 9-week coding bootcamp and learned Ruby on Rails. When I went on interviews, no…

Javascript has a one, single Call Stack which tracks which function is currently executing and what functions need execute after that. The call stack operates on a Last In, First Out basis. Functions…

In my personal and professional experience, I have been taught a plethora of techniques that have contributed to my personal success and that of my coaching clients. Everyone is different, and what…