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TEACHERS:
THE JEDI MASTERS For as long as I have been
in America, I have always thought that teaching was a thankless profession.
Twenty years ago, when I came to America as a refugee from an oppressive
Communist country, I was overwhelmed by the wonders of wealth, technology, and
truly democratic values in this great country. Yet, for all the wonders of
America that I could see and appreciate, I could never quite figure out why
people in such a great country could treat teachers, people who engage in one of
the most honorable professions, so badly. I thought Americans
couldn’t have treated teachers any worse. After all, teachers are among the
lowest paid professionals. They are among the least respected and appreciated
people in American society. Expectations on them are so high. They aren’t
expected just to teach and open young minds to the wonder of learning. They are
also expected to be baby sitter, policeman, and judge. They toil on serving
largely unappreciative students and parents. How bad can it get? Yet, I was wrong. Teachers
indeed can be treated worse. The tragedy and aftermath of Littleton, Colorado
proved it. Besides being unappreciated, underpaid, and overworked, teachers
could also be shot at, killed, and held liable for things they have little power
to control. Now, they are also expected to be clairvoyant seers of disasters
that are about to happen and to prevent them. The tragedy of Littleton
provoked much debate and soul searching for America. Countless words and
articles have been written about the event. Everyone is searching answers to the
question "Why?". Everyone is looking for quick fixes. The usual
suspects were rounded up and examined. The most obvious suspects were guns and
the National Rifle Association (NRA). Hollywood was up next with its violent
movies and marketing of these movies to teens. Of course, the parents of
troubled teens who committed these heinous acts could not be let off the hooks.
The arcane, cliquish culture of American high school life was also examined in
excruciating details and assigned a large part of the blame. Surely, if these
kids were not so alienated and pushed to the point where their anger got out of
control, then these tragedies would not have happened. Last, in the spirit of
making all suspects accountable, school districts and teachers were also
crucified for not paying more attention to troubled teens. The arguments for and
against all these suspects are intense and earnest. Listening to and reading
these arguments, I have little doubt that all of them should share parts of the
blame. However, as a naturalized American citizen, the arguments also strike me
as typical American. They are politically correct, have some shades of truth,
yet are incomplete and in many cases attempts to find a scapegoat to blame. They
stop short of asking the really hard questions about the modern American value
system. These questions are many. For me, the most important question that was
not asked is "Are we, as a society, being fair to teachers?" In other
words, do we pay them enough respect and compensation for the important work
they do for our children? Are our expectations of them appropriate? More
importantly, are they simply an easy target to shift all the dirty works we
don’t want to do or the blame we don’t want to take? At first glance, these
questions may seem tangential to the issue of school violence. With more
reflection, they would be much more relevant. Teachers, after all, have a strong
role in forming students’ values and helping to solve their troubles. They can
help to deflect or prevent future violence by teaching teens appropriate ways to
resolve anger or conflicts. Yet, more often than not, we expect them to prevent
violence the way the police would prevent crimes. We expect them to do things
they are not trained to do, nor should ever be expected to do. As a society, we are guilty
for creating a difficult environment for teachers to do their job, i.e.,
educating youths and helping parents to instill in them proper values and
behaviors. We understand the value of education and want our kids to do well in
school, but we can’t spare the time and energy to help them read or do their
homework. Neither do we have the desire to push juniors too hard. Given a choice
of either watching Jerry Springer on TV or helping their kids to do math
problems, many people would opt for the couch. Given a choice of working
overtime to get money for the next dream car or spending time with their kids to
teach them some basic values, many people would say the kids can wait, but the
car can’t. People have more important things in their lives to do, more
interesting things to see, and better places to go. The kids can always wait.
Besides, there are schools, teachers, and the television to shape them. As a
result of these choices, society gives ill prepared kids, kids with bad habits
and attitudes, to schools and somehow expect them to perform miracles. Perhaps
the only organization that could take bad materials and somehow turn them into
decent product is the U.S. Marines. But American schools are not
the US Marines, and their teachers are not drill sergeants. The only thing that
teachers have in common with drill sergeants are their low salaries and the high
expectation of molding youngsters into something better. Other than that,
teachers faced significantly more restrictions in what they could do in working
with poorly motivated, ill prepared students. They can’t force students to
wear uniforms to promote a sense of unity or teamwork. They can’t make
students have clean cut hair to promote order. Doing any of these things would
be grave violations of individual freedom or sense of identity. Further,
teachers can’t lean too hard on the students if they misbehave. With all the
shootings committed by teenagers in America, teachers have to be mindful of
getting shot themselves if they were to mess with the wrong students. Even more,
teachers have to be mindful of messing with the wrong parents, lest they get
sued by parents who think their troubled juniors are angels and if there were
anything wrong, then someone else, not their angels, are to blame. All of these
difficult working conditions may be more or less acceptable if teachers are
accorded the proper respect and appreciation by students and parents. Instead,
the respect and appreciation accorded to teachers are slightly better than those
reserved for school janitors, and much less than those reserved for sport and
entertainment stars. It is hard to imagine any US Marines drill sergeant being
effective without commanding the total respect and attention of new recruits.
Yet, teachers are expected to be effective despite the lack of respect and the
difficult working conditions they toil in. Couple all these reasons with their
miserable low salaries, and it is easy to understand why many teachers choose to
leave for other professions and less and less college graduates want to go into
teaching. The observations I derived
above came from my 3 years experience in California high school in the late
1970's, early 1980's. I still remember my impressions of the San Diego’s
Woodrow Wilson Junior high school I attended twenty years ago. I had arrived in
America from a refugee camp in Malaysia few weeks before and hardly understood
any English. In the first few months, I was in awe of just about everything in
the school. The students here looked so big and beautiful. They swaggered with
so much confidence that they must be really, really smart. The school provided
free, nutritious lunch to students, something totally outside the imagination of
a young boy from the impoverished, oppressive country of Vietnam like me. The
school’s library was the largest I had ever seen up to that date. When I saw
the school athletic field and gymnasium, my mind automatically tried to
calculate how many of the schools in Vung Tau, the little Vietnam city where I
came from, it would take just to match the size of the athletic facilities of
this ordinary high school in America. Everything was grand and beautiful. I
thought I had gone to an educational heaven. In my simple mind then, it was no
wonder why America was so great and its people so smart. However, even with my
limited English and wide-eyed ignorance then, I quickly noticed several things
that were not quite right in this paradise. First, the students displayed an
amazingly wide array of clothing and hairstyles. It seemed that too many
students were out to attract attention to how they looked, rather than doing the
thing they should be doing, studying. In time, my Confucian mind learned to
grudgingly accept that the wild clothes and hairstyles are exercises of the
freedom of expression and individuality. Then, more unbelievable
things started hitting my simple, Third World mind. I was shocked to see the
attitudes of several of my classmates. When asked by their teachers about
homework assignments, they nonchalantly responded that they didn't do them
without giving any acceptable reasons. They acted as if not doing their homework
was no big deal. Their attitudes in responding to teachers were not even
remotely respectful. But even more shocking to me was how the teachers went on
to blithely ignoring the students' disrespect. Something was very wrong with the
teacher-student relationship in this high school. I didn't understand the
culture and protocols of this place, and I was too shy to ask anyone. As the years went on, I
learned many other wonderful things about American culture. Many "Special
Days" I never knew before, Valentine Day, Father Day, Mother Day, Secretary
Day, were relentless pounded into my consciousness by the great American
marketing machine. Yet, for many years, I wondered why there was no such thing
as Teacher Day in this country. In the mid 1990's, I had the
opportunity to come back and work in Vietnam for a three years stint with a
large American corporation. Many things changed and many more things didn't
change in this country. Vietnam remained one of the poorest countries in the
world. Human rights were regularly violated, and the country consistently ranked
in the top three most corrupt countries. 40% of Vietnam's children were
malnourished, and despite the reported high literacy rate, most of Vietnamese
children didn't have much chance to continue school beyond fifth grade. A proud
people, Vietnamese had little to be proud of these days. Many Vietnamese I
talked to feel ashamed and angry because Vietnam trailed far behind its
neighbors in just about everything. Despite all the depressing
grimness and squalor, I found something here that Vietnamese still could be very
proud about. They still hold education in high value, and treated teachers with
the highest respect and honor. Commercial creations like "Mother Day",
"Father Day" and "Secretary Day" did not yet make their way
to Vietnam, while "Valentine Day" was just barely introduced to Hanoi
and Saigon by the American expatriates who worked there. Instead, "Teacher
Day" on November 20th was genuinely celebrated throughout the
country by all high school students, and even by those who have left schools for
a long time. On this day, students everywhere would buy gifts and pay visit to
their teachers' families. Events would be organized to remind everyone of the
value and contributions teachers make to society, and for students to pay their
respect and gratitude. On several occasions, I saw adults in their mid thirties
or forties making visits to pay respect to teachers who taught them twenty,
thirty years before. The thing I found even more
remarkable than the traditional respect and value Vietnamese held for teachers
was that this tradition survived even the harsh, oppressive rule of Communism of
the past two decades. Like everyone else, teachers in Vietnam endured harsh
living conditions and poverty. The average salary for high school teachers in
Vietnam was about 500,000 dong (about 35 US dollars) a month. Twenty years
before when I was still in Vietnam, I knew of many teachers who had to work as
cyclo drivers or to sell food in open market to supplement their income. For
many Vietnamese teachers, the things they had to do for survival brought them
shame and embarrassment. They almost could not face students who looked up to
them. Yet, Vietnamese students as a whole did not seem to have diminished
respect and appreciation for the teachers and their profession. Thinking back to my twenty
years of living in America, I realized that I almost never hear an American
student mentioned about visiting their high school teachers once they graduated.
I never hear a student talk about his teachers with much respect and
appreciation. Instead, what I saw was teenage students swooning over and
idolizing men who could dunk a basketball with gusto or young boys and girls who
make a lot of money in acting or entertainment. Teenagers' role models, more
often than not, were people who had no clear ideas of what their values were,
what civilized behaviors should be, or what directions they were heading to in
their lives. In 1995, I had the chance to
visit my high school Vietnamese Literature teacher in the coastal town of Vung
Tau. I had not seen him in twenty years. Looking at the frail old man my teacher
had become, my mind conjured up an interesting analogy. My old teacher looked
about as old, wizened, and unimpressive as Yoda, the Jedi Master in George
Lucas’ popular "Star Wars" movies. Like the character Yoda, my
teacher had not fared well under the Evil Empire of Communist Vietnam. He had
not taught in nearly twenty years, and today lived in impoverished, reclusive
retirement. Yet, in a sense, he was my Jedi Master, who opened my mind and heart
to the strength in me and the possibility of the future when I was a very
impressionable young boy. This old man was the person who taught me to
appreciate the beauty of my mother’s tongue, to believe in my own abilities
and inner strength, and to have pride in my root, my people, despite the poverty
and backwardness of Vietnam. This old man, my father, and many other teachers I
had along the way had taught me how to use my inner "Force", the pride
and the belief in myself, to overcome the many obstacles I faced later in life.
Because of their teachings, I was able to go from a poor, ragged orphan to
become a well-educated, successful professional today. Now, as a father, I look to
the next millennium and my daughter’s education with excitement and at the
same time, much concerns. My daughter will have much more resources, more access
to education and information than I had in my youth. She will also grow up in an
exciting time where technological innovations happen more and faster than ever
before in human history. Yet, I can almost see the day where she would be
learning Literature and History on the computer instead of from a human being
who would instill in her a love of learning, and an appreciation for the beauty
of language or the genius, the courage of people who have gone before. Machines
can only transmit information, but not knowledge and values. She would be
studying in America high schools, where violence has become common, and the
value system has long been in crisis. Would she be fortunate enough to find the
good teachers with heart? Would she be able to find the "Jedi Masters"
who can show her how to master the "Force", the strength, courage, and
other great qualities in herself, to become a knight of her own? Until America
solves its school violence and value system problems, I know that the best thing
I could do is to teach my daughter some old fashioned values that I grew up
with. If she grows up having enough respect, appreciation, and gratitude for the
people who would open her mind, then she would someday find the Jedi Masters who
will make her into a good, decent human being. Copyright 1999 Trinh Do June 15, 1999
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