“ ‘The moment you open your mouth, they’ll know you are not one of their own’ ” (Suárez-Orozco et al, 2008, 57).

As I attempt to keep it together enough to express myself on election night, I find it perfectly fitting that I am discussing the concepts of “Americanization” and “model minorities,” as immigration is currently a HUGE topic on the national and global scale. In this week’s reading, we learned that the struggles of immigration are two-fold for adolescent immigrants: not only are they experiencing the unsettling changes to their minds and bodies brought by adolescence, but they are also adapting to a completely new cultural, linguistic, and scholastic environment. They have control over none of this, and educators especially need to be sensitive to these changes and also careful not to subconsciously categorize students according to stereotypes like that of the “model minority.” Furthermore, as Professor Doucet stated in class last week, immigrant parents often resist “Americanization,” not because they want to block out aspects of their host country completely, but because they are scared of the differences between their new environment’s cultural values and their own. Educators can support immigrant students by keeping an open mind and getting to know the strengths and challenges of each student as an individual, rather than giving in to stereotypes, and by remaining flexible to the various relationships that immigrant parents desire to form with schools.