“To behave differently – too nice, gentle, kind, or sincere – meant that he would be vulnerable and preyed upon.” (Sadowski, 2008, p. 24)

In “Joaquín’s Dilemma” the quote “To behave differently – too nice, gentle, kind, or sincere – meant that he would be vulnerable and preyed upon.” (p.24) reminded me of a student that I once worked with while in college.

In my senior year of college I took a class for “mentoring at-risk youth” and while in this class I had the opportunity to work with middle school students at an alternative high school (a school where students who had been expelled from their previous school were sent). While working at this school I was able to tutor students one-on-one. One of the students that I worked with was a middle school boy who wanted to learn and change and do well in this alternative school so that he could return to his former school and then join the military after graduating. However, the dilemma that this boy had was that he had been expelled from his previous school for fighting and he had told me that he wanted to stop fighting but one of the other older students told him that he was going to beat him up after school in the parking lot and he didn’t know what to do. If he didn’t fight he would be seen as weak by his peers and therefore be “vulnerable and preyed upon” whereas, if he did fight he could get in serious trouble with the school which would ruin his effort to become a “good student”. Although my experience represents a very extreme case, as teachers we have to understand this struggle of contrasting identities that students are going through and find a way to help them through that struggle.