Andrade, I never heard about him before the video that was shown in class. He seems like a truly remarkable guy. He puts many thoughts into his students. The thing I love the most is how he spoke of the urban community kids. He didn't speak of them as hoodlums, thugs , or troublemakers but he saw them as "roses that grew past the concrete". He took his time to understand their struggle, he took the time to understand them as humans. He shows them things that they probably have never seen before in their lives, things that they probably didn't even imagine existed. Something that really captivated me about him is how hard he tries to make others understand how important these kids are to our society. People put names on them automatically without giving them the time of day to actually show who they truly are. He really struck a nerve on me when he spoke about Maya Angelou. He spoke of old, tiny , weak Angelou coming in between a fight of two men. Pulling them apart and tugging at them seemed almost impossible with her stature. But then he spoke of how she stopped it all. She looked into a face of a young man she didnt know and said " Do you know how important you are?". For his response, tears flowed from his face and that young man was none other than Tupac Shakur. Tupac, one of my idols, the way he spoke through his music captivated me. Telling me how important I am, and now i see where that all came from. He was a rose that pushed through the concrete and honestly, I see myself as such a rose too. All though I may not be from deep East Oakland or Compton or any of the "corrupted" cities, I did have a time where I forgot my importance, I did have a time when I honestly didn't care about what I did or didn't do. I didn't know who I was, I just knew what people expected me to be. I was a horrible person at one time in my life, but I was also lucky enough to have someone come to me and tell me how important I was and what I was capable of doing.
"Forget what everyone expects of you Crystal, if you build your own life then your life it will be",
I wanted to build my own life. I want something better for myself, I figure I am here for a reason, there's a purpose for me somewhere on this planet.
Andrade reminded me of someone very special to me. He reminded me of a teacher I had in High school, her name is Ms.Emery. I swear she is a teacher I will never forget. Many teachers in my High school would loath the "hoodlums", you could tell that the teachers didn't even want to put any hope into them. Ms. Emery showed us something different. She was a marketing teacher, she showed us how marketing is a big part of the making of society. Marketing the right clothes to wear, the right body to have, the American dream of having enough. It was a very educational class, but there was something passed that. She gained a relationship with ALL of us. She wanted to know about our lives, she wanted to know our struggles, stresses, what hurt us and made us sad. I guess you can say she ended up with most of the trouble makers and not purposely haha. But its almost as if she evaluated us. She saw how we communicated, the separate groups in the class and who had problems with who in the class. I remember one day, a fight broke outside of class right before the bell had rung. It was two of her students, I never seen this by a teacher especially with how small she was haha, but she ran out there as fast as she could and stood in the middle of the boys. She got hit, but she didn't back down. The thing I noticed that was different was the way she was scolding them. She didn't scold them like any angry teacher but she scolded them like a mother who was worried and who loved them a lot. She told us everyday how IMPORTANT we were. She showed us tapes on the black panthers, civil rights movements, on everything that showed us how we were now able to be students in a class. Another day that stands out is a day I really will never forget. I got to the classroom and the door was locked and she stood outside the door waiting for all of us. We all questioned asking why she wouldn't open the door. The bell rang and she looked at all of us and said directly," who is white?". We all looked at her weird while one guy raised his hand. She said,"Are you truly white? Did your ancestors discover this land? Did they come here on the ship?" He said no. And she stated " None of you are allowed in my classroom because you are not white, how does that make you feel?". We all stood in shock, not even knowing what to say. She told us that because she was not white she couldn't be in the class either. She then spoke to us about how hard our ancestors had fought for us just to be where we were, just to be able to walk through the door. They fought everyday just to give us what we had, but her question was how hard were we going to fight to keep it. How hard were we willing to fight to actually be in the classroom. At the end she ended up letting us in but when she said that I didn't have the right to be in class because of who I was, it changed me forever. I think it showed all of us how lucky we were to sit in those spots everyday to learn. She just opened our eyes to everything other people said we couldn't do and she stood up for us. She stood up to everyone who said that we couldn't amount to anything and all we wanted to do was stand with her.
Ms.Emery was my personal Andrade and I was very lucky to have an experience like that. We were not just a class, we were a family. We stuck with each other, enemies became friends and she was just our light of hope in a big room. I wish everyone could experience that.
No comments:
Post a Comment