Public School Does Not Serve or Fail Students

4-3

Zhikai Zhu (Bony)

EAD 1 Section 10

Mr. Akey

December 2, 2015

Public School Does Not Serve or Fail Students

School raises and shapes people a lot. However, school systems are not as simple as most people think. In America, there are lot of immigrant students and foreign students. Some of them are lucky. The public schools provides them a safe and healthy environment to grow up and absorb fresh knowledge. In addition, they also can get along with their classmates. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of students involved in a tough atmosphere because they meet bad teachers and suffer from unreasonable school policy. With a poor family background and bad school, their life is not as good as it should be. Lynda Barry, a Filipino American cartoonist, writes “The Sanctuary of School” to show how the public school and her teacher served to encourage her when she felt hopeless in her family. During that time, she fell in love with drawing which led her to becoming of cartoonist. On the other hand, Bich Minh Nguyen, talks her school experience in the article “The Good Immigrant Student”. She writes that she and her sister were treated unfairly in her school life and eventually she works hard by herself and then goes on to success. They are both immigrant students but had difference educational experiences. As a matter of fact, it is true that teachers and public school policies influence students’ future, but being success or fail are finally depends on students’ attitudes and endeavors.

Different teachers in public schools influence students positively and negatively. “It was winter and my parents had been fighting all night. They were short on money and long on relatives who kept “temporarily” moving into our house because they had nowhere else to go.” (Barry, Page 69) Barry was not lucky because she lived in a poor family and has poor relatives. She hated being the house because she was so tired of hearing her parents fighting. Barry was lucky too because of her public school. “Mrs. LeSane asked me what was wrong and when I said “Nothing”, she seemingly left it at that. But she asked me if I would carry her purse for her, an honor above all honors, and she asked if I wanted to come into Room2 early and paint.” (Barry, Page 70)She met Mrs. Clair LeSane, a very nice teacher. She know that Barry did not want to share the bad mood so she asked Barry to paint because she trust painting has the power to heal troubled students. As expected, it did work. “We all had a chance at it ---- to sit apart from the class for a while to paint, draw and silently work out impossible problems on 11*17 sheets of newsprint. Drawing came to mean everything to me. At the back table in room2, I learned to build myself a life preserver that I could carry into my home.” (Barry, Page 71) Barry felt so good that temporarily forgot her family problem and other worries. She just fell in the happiness of drawing and liked to be in the Room2 which she described as “Sanctuary”. On the contrary, Nguyen had the experiences of bad teacher who make her disappointed. “I waited for the stuffed lion the rest of that year, with a kind of patience I have no patience for today. To no avail. In June, on the last day of school, Mrs. Alexander gave the stuffed lion to Brenda to keep forever.”(Nguyem, Page91) Mrs. Alexander had announced that the best student of a week is able to get a stuffed lion as a reward. Nguyen performed well and tried his best to get the lion. Unfortunately, Mrs. Alexander treated her unevenly and she never would give the prize to a foreigner. Her self-esteemed was hurt by Mrs. Alexander’ decision. “Some kids want to rebel; other kids want to disappear. I wanted to disappear. I was not brave enough to shrug my shoulders and flaunt my difference; because I could not disappear into the crowd, I wished to disappear entirely. Anyone might have mistaken this for passivity.” ( Nguyen, Page 92) She just could not stand the environment of class and Mrs Alexander. She felt that no one actually cares about her performance in school. As a result, teacher affect students a lot. A good teacher not only teaches children but also helps children get rid of the trouble but a bad teacher can hurt the self-esteem of students and lead them to be tempted into misbehavior.

Different schools have different school policies that also affect students. “I was lucky. I had Mrs. LeSane. I had Mr. Gunderson. I had an abundance of art supplies. And I had a particular brand of neglect in my home that allowed me to slip away and gets to them. But what about the rest of the kids who weren’t as lucky? What happened to them?” (Lynda, Page71) Barry mentioned that she was in a good school system that offered good teachers, securities and the most important things are reasonable school policies. Nguyen, Anh and Cristina suffered from the bad school policies when they was in the City School, a public middle school and also a charter school. “There were no sports team. And volunteering was mandatory…. as they got older they transferred to one of the big high school nearby, perhaps wishing to play sports… Each, half semester, after grades were doled out, giant dot-matrix printouts of everyone’s GPAs were posted in hallways.”(Nguyen, Page 93) Nguyen complains that the City School had so many policies unsatisfying to students because it did not care about young people’s passion of sports and put too much pressure on students’ academically. Those bad polices will not only make students tired of study but also potentially to push them to transfer to another school. Consequently, a fair and more reasonable public school policy is essential for students’ growth.