Lee, S. J. (2008). The impact of stereotyping on Asian American students. In M. Sadowski (Ed.), Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education (2nd Ed., pp. 75-84). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.
“Teachers and other education professionals commonly evaluate Asian American students according to the standards of the model minority. While there is evidence that Asian Americans do well academically as a group, this lumping together of numerous Asian ethnic groups hides the variation in academic achievement across groups and among individuals. Students able to live up to the standards are held up as examples for others to follow, and those unable to meet them are deemed failed or substandard Asians. In my research on Hmong American students at a high school in the Midwest, I found educators identified many Southeast Asian American students as failing to achieve model minority performance. ‘An East Asian student might be number three in the class, going to Yale, but the Southeast Asians aren’t very motivated,’ one counselor said. Here, the ‘success’ of East Asian American (i.e., model minority) students is used against the Southeast Asian American youth to cast the latter as underachievers.”
I chose this passage because it serves as a great pivot point for my experiences with different populations of asian students, asian american students, and stereotypes about them. I found the counselor’s observation about Southeast Asian students very interesting because I’ve found it to be the opposite of the truth. I worked for two summers as an Upward Bound summer mentor. I was responsible for the health and happiness of high school students as they stayed in university dorms and took prep classes for 6 weeks. There is a good sized Hmong population in Northwest Arkansas where the camp took place and several of our students were Hmong. They were all hard working. But that’s not what they noticed. I noticed that despite several administrators’ attempts to somehow put these kids in the same category, their uniqueness defied it. They supported each other as immigrants or the children of immigrants in understanding differences in culture or social norms but outside of that each had their own group of friends, interests, and very different personalities. Since I’m friends with them on Facebook, I’ve gotten to watch them mature and reach their goal of going to college. They’re still united by their shared background but each has their own interest.
Before I went to Japan, I had an image of immaculately uniformed perfect students listening and quietly doing their work. Then I started my job and met class 2-2 at Toyotsu Junior High. I was warned about them but thought, how bad can they be? Think altered uniform jackets with purple silk linings and colorful buttons, dyed hair, piercing, short skirts, crazy patterned socks, sprawling desks and foul language. I walked in and they all yelled “DARE (WHO)?!?” My preconceptions were shattered. They were my favorite class. I learned a lot over the two years I spent with class 2-2. I credit them with my NSFW Japanese and a much needed reevaluation of how to approach people I don’t know anything about.
The best way is to approach them like I don’t know anything about them. Nothing. Reading this selection reminded me of that. Everyone is an individual. Cultural information can indeed be very useful, but it cannot describe or explain every individual. So every time I make a 2 second judgement a certain student pops into my mind. Chair pushed back, legs spread wide, scowling and asking who I am.