(no subject)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love teaching. BUT, I am learning from my new job at the adult education center that there are some things a teacher can never be prepared for.
I met a new student today. She is 28. She reads at the level of a 6 year old. She's very sweet and wants to get her GED very much, but we have a LOT of work to do. It's hard to write an essay if you can barely speak the language.
Other students are brilliant, but for one reason or another they lost motivation, dropped out of school, slipped through the cracks. And now they're realizing they need help if they're going to make it outside of the Reservation.
Some of the people I teach have had rough times. Jail, drugs, violence, homelessness... Some of them I have to scrounge up food for before we can study, because they haven't eaten in too long. Luckily, my building also houses other programs geared toward helping Native Americans, such as counseling, substance abuse programs, food programs, health care, etc... so it's not too hard to dig up some food or help someone find a place to stay or someone to talk to. I am one of maybe 5 white people in the building, counting students and staff.
Eye-opening, to say the least. And hard to realize the injustices that have been done to these people. It can be argued that given their current resource access and per capita land holdings, Native North Americans should represent the wealthiest sector of the country. Conversely, they remain the most impoverished. Native Americans currently incur the lowest annual and lifetime incomes of any group on the continent, representing also, the highest unemployment rate, the highest rate of infant mortality, and death by malnutrition, exposure, and plague diseases. “Such conditions produce the sort of endemic despair that generates chronic alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse among more than half the native population” (Churchill 247). These are also factors that contribute to the fact that Native Americans represent a suicide rate 14.5 times the national average (Churchill 247). Further, despite undeniable evidence in the form of personal accounts, documented and alleged accounts of abuse, and a culture perpetually trying to rediscover itself in the face of unrelenting ethnocentricity and continued oppression, “the U.S. government has not assumed responsibility for it’s policy of genocide” against Native Americans (Smith 40). Native activists remain reluctant to push for a monetary compensation. The fact is the U.S. government is a government of occupation and American culture remains a culture of occupation. “The struggle for native sovereignty is a struggle for control over land and resources, rather than financial compensation for vast and continuing wrongs” (Smith 49).
I met a new student today. She is 28. She reads at the level of a 6 year old. She's very sweet and wants to get her GED very much, but we have a LOT of work to do. It's hard to write an essay if you can barely speak the language.
Other students are brilliant, but for one reason or another they lost motivation, dropped out of school, slipped through the cracks. And now they're realizing they need help if they're going to make it outside of the Reservation.
Some of the people I teach have had rough times. Jail, drugs, violence, homelessness... Some of them I have to scrounge up food for before we can study, because they haven't eaten in too long. Luckily, my building also houses other programs geared toward helping Native Americans, such as counseling, substance abuse programs, food programs, health care, etc... so it's not too hard to dig up some food or help someone find a place to stay or someone to talk to. I am one of maybe 5 white people in the building, counting students and staff.
Eye-opening, to say the least. And hard to realize the injustices that have been done to these people. It can be argued that given their current resource access and per capita land holdings, Native North Americans should represent the wealthiest sector of the country. Conversely, they remain the most impoverished. Native Americans currently incur the lowest annual and lifetime incomes of any group on the continent, representing also, the highest unemployment rate, the highest rate of infant mortality, and death by malnutrition, exposure, and plague diseases. “Such conditions produce the sort of endemic despair that generates chronic alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse among more than half the native population” (Churchill 247). These are also factors that contribute to the fact that Native Americans represent a suicide rate 14.5 times the national average (Churchill 247). Further, despite undeniable evidence in the form of personal accounts, documented and alleged accounts of abuse, and a culture perpetually trying to rediscover itself in the face of unrelenting ethnocentricity and continued oppression, “the U.S. government has not assumed responsibility for it’s policy of genocide” against Native Americans (Smith 40). Native activists remain reluctant to push for a monetary compensation. The fact is the U.S. government is a government of occupation and American culture remains a culture of occupation. “The struggle for native sovereignty is a struggle for control over land and resources, rather than financial compensation for vast and continuing wrongs” (Smith 49).