Curryed Away: Carrying Curry Education Away and Into the Classroom

One of the first things Curry teaches us is to “know your students”. It’s a great philosophy, and one that I teach by. I know that it pertains to students as individuals, but I also found it true for students as a whole. And when I made the switch from my student teaching in Cville to my first year at an international school in Germany, I really had to readjust my expectations.

In Cville I had two sets of kids: the “honors” students who came from upper-middle class (mostly white) backgrounds, and the lower SES kids who were mostly mixed race. These kids were my biggest challenges, as they were coming from homes where there wasn’t a place for them to study, a healthy meal to keep them going, and sometimes even a stable parent to support them. For them, school was often just the thing they did during the day to see their friends, and they didn’t think it would take them anywhere.

At the international school, most of my students have a loving family and a large bank account, and they value the education that they’re receiving. Clearly I had to readjust my way of thinking. Oddly, some of their behaviors are the same. I still don’t always get their homework, but instead of the reason being that they just didn’t care to do it or never have a materials, it’s because they had soccer and after-school music lessons and couldn’t fit it in. Or perhaps they already had 3 hours of homework in science and math and had to prioritize.

I think the biggest difference is that while my students all have physical homes, they don’t really have one place that they can call “home”. Many of them have lived in multiple countries over the years, and don’t identify strongly with one over another. Or they may have one parents from one country and another parent from a different country, but may never have lived in either. The best example I can give you is this: A student* at our school is ethnically Japanese. However, she was adopted by one parent who is German and another who is American, and spent the majority of her young life in India. She speaks Hindi, German, Italian, English, and Japanese. So what culture does she identify with the most? She’s trying very hard to make friends with the Indian girls at school, as she identified with that culture the most. Unfortunately, those girls don’t seem to like having her around or really see her as “Indian”.

Like this young girl, my students are privileged in a way that most of us will never know, and yet they can be so lonely. And like most middle schoolers, they are wacky, but also so shy when they have to make the switch to a new school for the umpteenth time. And most of my older kids can be slightly clueless about the problems of poverty, classism, and intolerance that exist outside of their bubble. Still, they can be entirely too serious about their academic life. They are all these things at once, and I continue to find out more as I scratch further and further beneath the surface.

I’ll leave you with this final example and question that I had the other day.

In my quest to “know my students”, I discovered that the reason why one of my students* didn’t turn his essay in on time (it was 5 days late) was because his weekends and after-school time are taken up by drama. Not only that, but his family returned to their home country and he remains here because the drama school that he was admitted to is very prestigious. Nevertheless, I was annoyed that he didn’t send me an email asking for an extension (which I would have gladly granted regardless of his situation). Someone even told me, “Don’t be too upset with him; his life is very hard”. I ended up accepting his paper, though I couldn’t help but feeling that I’d somehow “cheapened” what it means to have a deadline.

I imagine it is very hard indeed to be an ocean away from your parents and to be either studying or practicing non-stop. Still, something irked me about the situation. After all, some of my kids in the States didn’t have parents or even homes to go home to, or they were too busy worrying over younger siblings or after-school jobs to turn assignments in on time. Their lives were just as hard. Should deadlines not have applied to them either?

And so yes, we all have to know our students and make exceptions when they’re needed. But where do we draw the line? Does my talented, lonely international student deserve a break anymore than my underprivileged, worried students from the States? Somehow I suspect that “knowing your students” has as much to do with knowing yourself and knowing society as it does your students.

What do you think?

(*Note that some details have been changed to protect my students’ identities.)