“‘Mexicans are like thieves and bad people, and we’re not really like that.’ Student demographics in the U.S. continue to show an increase in the enrollment of immigrant children in public school systems. “About 10.2 million of all students enrolled in public schools, or slightly more than 20%, speak a language other than English at home” (Fry & Gonzales, 2008, p. 11). While immigrant students provide new energy and ideas to a new school community, they also might face potential obstacles in their transition to their new schools and home communities that school counselors need to be mindful of and attentive to in their outreach and advocacy. Some obstacles students might face include adjustment issues such as transgenerational trauma (Phipps & Degges-White, 2014), conflict during racial and ethnic identity formation (Iwamoto, Negi, Partiali, & Creswell, 2013), racial microaggressions (Gabriel, 2015a, 2015b; Nadal, Escobar, Prado, David, & Haynes, 2012), and depression” (Yeh, Borrero, & Tito, 2013).
This passage highlights the increasing immigrant children in the public school system and links to the Racism and Discrimination problems. This statement is not true because it judges people by merely skin and race, which is not fair for Mexicans.
In New York City public school systems, there is a dramatically increasing enrollment of immigrant children. The Public School 94, is the school I am doing student teaching now, has 80% Chinese immigrant children and 20% Spanish & Mexican immigrant children. I do not see any white kid in our school. There are more and more public schools are operating like the PS.94, which has a majority of immigrant children from Asia and other places. The class I assistant with is a Kindergarten level class, which is an ENL class, surprisingly, over 95% of kids do not understand English, even the alphabet ABC. I believe that my students are facing many challenges such as language challenge and cultural challenge. For example, they are too young to get used to living here; they just immigrant here so everything seems different from what they were used to have; language is also a big challenge too. We have six Mexican children in our class. I treat all students as the same, providing aids when they need. Those Mexican children in our class are a little bit behind, from my observation, it could be caused by some reasons like their parents may have less care to their study or they are too young to understand knowledge in class, even they need times to get used to new language and environment. We cannot ignore the existed truth that is not every single person is super smart and learning fast.
Also, as teachers, I think we should not judge people by skins or race or nations either. If a teacher has some negative judgment on children, then the teacher might pay less attention to them even give up them, which is very unfair for children and it will impact children for their future study and life too.