October 28th, 2008

Growing up, I received a Catholic school education that was very much about rote learning. As a child, I learned that I had a really good memory for facts and so I used that to my advantage to do well in school. Later on, when I came to the U.S., the education I received at a public school in Queens, New York was very similar in that it was also based around rote learning. It was not until I was accepted to a Quaker boarding school and spent three years there that my habits of thinking were changed substantially.

At Westtown, it was no longer sufficient to mirror back a set of facts I had learned from the book. Most of our assessments involved essays where we were required to provide a solid line of reasoning. I had a hard time adjusting to both the academic and social demands of a new school where I was one of a few minority and working class students. I also brought with me many defficiencies, specifically in my writing, that made working at the same level as the other students at Westtown difficult. As Delpit states, I did not come to boarding school with the same social capital as my fellow classmates because my single parent mom was too busy working a factory job to provide me with the attention that I would need to overcome the mediocre education I was receiving at my elementary school.

I was fortunate to find a teacher who understood what Delpit was referring to when she talks about educating minority students so that they have access to the codes of power and succeed academically. Rather than being easy on me, this teacher raised the expectations and demanded more from me. Whenever I would resort to speaking back the way I did back home with my friends, he would take the time to correct me (and he did this in both English and Spanish--he happened to be a Spanish teacher, which is how we became friends). The important thing is that he did this in a way that did not make me feel devalued, but rather in a way that made me feel like I had an ally who was on my side and wanted me to succeed. The important thing is that I saw how much this teacher cared about me in other situations and so I knew that when he was correcting me it came from a position of genuine interest in my success and well being. I was lucky to experience the same thing in college. I found professors who were not easy on me and I generally found the Hispanic professors to be the toughest of all. I think they understood, from their own experiences, that to succeed in a selective academic environment as a Hispanic or Latino person, I would have to understand the way people in that culture of power speak, write and think.

While I continued to grow intellectually over the years, I don't think there was a major change in my way of thinking. I still saw learning as the acquisition of more knowledge and skills. I think much of this came from the fact that I grew up mostly alone and I am a child of divorce. Books became my escape as a child and I learned early on to trust their authority. I think the major event in helping me to break free of the habits of mind that I learned as a child has been the fact that I am losing my vision. The belief that I had in objective reality (and the possibility of there being some kind of absolute truth to discover) is now shaken by the fact that at times my senses "lie" to me. With retinitis pigmentosa, objects appear in front of me unexpectedly as they move from my blind spot and come into focus in my remaining field of vision. It seems like these objects, which were not there a minute ago, suddenly appear out of nowhere. When your vision is lying to you, the belief in some kind of objective reality that we can know through empirical observation is much harder to accept. I think the fact that I am losing my vision, instead of restricting me, has actually liberated me from old ways of thinking and my belief in objectivity. I am now more willing to accept that everything is based on your perspective, from the way you think to the power you hold, to the choices you make. My lack of vision has in fact allowed me to see more. I can see how things may be different than they appear depending on where I stand, sometimes literally.