Thread: To understand students, teachers go to Mexico!

This is just sickening! Clearly the article is addressing illegal alien students and it appears that the only thing the teachers bring back from their trips to Mexico is a boatload of excuses for the lack of learning skills these students bring with them.

It appears these Chesco teachers have adopted the MEChA motto of "for the race (latino) everything, outside the race, nothing", at least as far as their students are concerned.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news ... 160658.htm

Chesco teachers visit Mexico to bridge cultural divide

Some teachers have gone south to learn more about Latino students.

By Dan Hardy
Inquirer Staff Writer

Two years ago when Salomon Diaz came from Mexico to live in Kennett Square in Chester County, he knew life would be different.

New home, new language, new school.

There were other changes as well - challenges that most of the teachers in Salomon's new school were not tuned in to.

In his home town of Moroleon, in central Mexico's Guanajuato state, Diaz walked to school and his mother made the trek at midday to bring him a hot meal.
At Kennett Square, Diaz had to bring his lunch or buy it, "and I didn't like the school lunch," he said. Riding the school bus with children he didn't know "was scary," said Diaz, now 14 and entering seventh grade in the fall.

All in all, "it took a long time to feel more at home," he said.

To help students like Diaz and their families, some teachers in Chester County are traveling to Guanajuato state, where most of the Latino students come from, to learn more about their lives there.

Several dozen have been part of a weeklong West Chester University graduate school class that started in 2001 called Humanizing Teaching and Learning: Integrating a Mexican Perspective.

Also, the Chester County Intermediate Unit's migrant education program sends two Chester County teachers or administrators to Guanajuato each year.

The trips are "invaluable - it is an eye-opener to understand how the system works there," said Maria Turse, the migrant education program's supervisor, who has traveled to Guanajuato.

Rudolph Karkosak, the Kennett district school superintendent, went on the trip last year. "It really helps teachers understand the challenges their students face when they come here," he said. And "it shows that we care. We want them to learn about us; this shows that we also want to learn about them and their lives."

Gail Bollin, the West Chester professor who leads the graduate school trip, said: "Our goal is for teachers to study the schools their students come from - what they learn and how they're taught. By learning about Mexican culture, she said, teachers "can better understand what their students are going through when they come here. And they experience being in a place where English is not spoken as a first language, so they have a sense of the kind of trauma that the children face when they come to the U.S."

This summer's group included six Chester County teachers, four from Avon Grove and two from Tredyffrin/Easttown. The Avon Grove district has about 700 Latino students, the second-most in Chester County. Tredyffrin/Easttown has about 100.

When they return, the teachers, who receive college credit for the course, are required to create lesson plans on Mexican culture or start a project to better meet the needs of Mexican students and parents in their district.

Mexican immigrants and their families have been arriving in southern Chester County in large numbers since the early 1990s, mostly to work the mushroom farms.

Chester County now has the largest number of residents of Mexican origin in the Philadelphia suburbs. According to the Census Bureau, the number grew from 2,689 in 1990 to 13,320 in 2004.

As a result, schools in Chester County have among the highest number of Latino students in the region, state data show. And, most are from Mexico, school officials say.

The Kennett Consolidated School District in southern Chester County has a 35 percent Latino enrollment - the fourth-highest in the region.

During a visit to one Mexican school, Bollin said, "when we asked if students had family members in Pennsylvania, about 90 percent raised their hands."

If American teachers don't understand the educational system in Mexico, Bollin said, education can suffer.

In Mexico, kindergarten students don't learn the alphabet or numbers or shapes or colors, she said. It's more about socializing.

But, in Chester County schools, Bollin said, kindergarten "students learn the alphabet, they can count to 20, they know all their shapes, they know all their colors."

Teachers expect the Mexican students to know all of that too and if they don't, "they're thought of as being not very smart," Bollin said. "Teachers have a lot of negative stereotypes that they are not even conscious of. Knowing the situation in Mexico can combat that."

In their new schools, the Mexican students usually attend classes for limited-English students. But many struggle to catch up or keep up.

State proficiency tests for the Avon Grove and Kennett School Districts show that fewer than 30 percent of Latino eighth graders, for example, meet state reading and math proficiency benchmarks. On average, their non- Latino classmates do more than twice as well.

Susan Calio, who teaches Mexican students who have limited English ability at Avon Grove High School, said the trip helped her understand her students' lives in Mexico.

"I feel a little more credible now," she said. "My understanding of their home, their communities and their culture is better... . I can't wait to talk to my students about it when I see them again."

Calio also learned about differences in the two educational systems. In Guanajuato, she said, "there aren't libraries of books in the schools, with book shelves full of books presenting alternate ways of thinking."

When they come to Avon Grove, the students are not used to working alone or in small groups and being asked to select a book from the library. "There's none of that where we were in Mexico," Calio said.

Mexican parents face their own adjustments to American schools.

Olga Zavala's 11-year-old son, Diego, had just started school in Moroleon when she and her family moved to Kennett Square in 2000. "Here, there is much more contact between parents and teachers," Zavala said. "I was not used to that."

Calio said she wants to set up a more extensive orientation program for Mexican parents. And "I want to talk to them more about what they can do to provide a space for their children to do homework and a schedule that allows them to do it," she said.

Efforts like that often pay off, said Kirk Fetters and Ann Mathis, a husband and wife who taught at Kennett High School for more than 30 years before retiring last year. They went to Guanajuato with Bollin in 2002.

The couple found that Guanajuato schools don't teach cursive writing, so parents and children often can't decipher the hand-written notes that American teachers send home.

Even when the students understand English, there can be miscues.

Because Mexican teachers are so highly respected, "when you say, 'Do you understand,' [students] say yes, but often they don't have a clue," Mathis said. "They're not going to insult you by saying that you didn't teach it well."

After their 2002 trip, Mathis and Fetters held workshops for teachers throughout the Kennett district. Mathis, who ran the Student Assistance Program at the high school, also included information about Guanajuato in orientation sessions for new teachers.

"All that made a huge difference," Mathis said. "You only need a couple of teachers to change the atmosphere of a building."

Who is funding these trips? I sure hope it is not U.S. taxpayer dollars paying for these Mexico vacations.

Sounds like more "dumbing down" for American students to level the playing field.

When immigrants come to America they should assimilate to our country not the other way around! Why are the spanish so special that we need to learn about their culture! Join the melting pot and assimilate!

Is La Raza behind the funding of this nonsense ?!

Wonder if someone will pay to send me on a fact finding trip to Mexico
Maybe tour the beaches this winter and check out the many jobs we have
transplanted see the Ford, and Dodge plants etc. get some tips about there election process, immigration policys toward Americans. Maybe
get some tips on proper law inforcement etc.

Dumbing down of our children isn't enough. Now they're dumbing down those who teach them as well.