Seetee's Blog

Things aren't always what they seem

Tonight, we stayed late at work, and at around 9:30pm or so, our janitorial staff came in to do the bi-weekly cleaning. Our janitorial staff is a family of Latin descent, a man, his wife, and usually one or two of their kids come along to help out, even on school nights.

The title of this post is because every time I see the family come in to clean, a memory of what I read in Denise Clark Pope’s book which I read a year or so ago comes to mind.

So Denise Pope is great. She started the Stressed Out Students (SOS) Conference at Stanford, which has been a huge success in the Bay Area as well as all over the United States. I first learned about her work when I was working at the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health as an Americorps member doing community outreach because the foundation had given her seed money to start the project which has blossomed since the very beginning. As a student growing up in a very academically competitive region of the Bay Area, so many parts of each story resonate strongly with what I experienced in high school, and a lot of what I know my classmates experienced as well.

However, I’m kind of going away from my point, so back on track.

So, in the book (which I lent to Emily so I don’t have it in my possession) a young girl is mentioned. The girl is a high school student of Latin descent and it explains how after school she works at her part-time job until late into the evening to help provide for her family, and helps with her brothers and sisters, and still finds time to complete her homework. From an outsider’s perspective, many times we enter a classroom and see all the students equally. Equality is a good thing right? Not always. It’s kind of like how being colorblind in a race sense is in fact ignoring things that people have to go through due to their race/outwardly appearance.

Every time I see the two teenage children of our maintenance staff vacuuming our floors at 10:00 at night while their younger sister who is of elementary school age sits upstairs doing her homework, I am reminded how privileged I was, and how many of us were growing up.  When I was 8, at 10pm I would be all ready for bed, showered and tucked in. When I was in high school, I was complaining about stupid things, feeling unloved at times, and stressed out by my education. I am reminded of how in Pope’s book, the girl talks about how sometimes she has to take shortcuts to get things done, not because she wants to, but simply because she doesn’t have as much time as other kids to spend on her homework. So when I write “Things aren’t always what they seem” it reminds me of how easily we can judge students on their performance without seeing what else is going on in their lives.

Growing up in a privileged environment, we are shielded from many realities that lead to the formation of stereotypes, which are constantly perpetuated by those around us. Stereotypes that pit one minority group above the other academically, which in fact is not a matter of intelligence, but rather a matter of a difference in circumstances.

I’m not really sure how to end this post, but I hope you can take the time to reflect on your own privileges, in a way to understand the struggles that need to be overcome by others who are not so privileged.

Also, read the book! I promise that it will be very insightful, and if you are from the same area as I am, you’ll find that in some cases, you will be reading about your own experience as a high school student.