waiting for superman
Watching this documentary made me really appreciate all the public education I’ve had ever since kindergarten. I remember in Kennedy, people used to laugh about how at Faria, we pushed our desks apart when taking tests and they were weirded out that we got actual letter grades. I always took this for granted, but the power of a lottery school in our current education system puts people on a different track.
Cupertino’s not a good example because the lack of low-performing minority groups confounds the variables of the performance of a school system and the inherent learning ability of the kids; but I think Faria is a good, sturdy lottery-based school that is at least semi-representative of other lottery schools out there. I dug around a bit and found this adorable website set up by some of my fifth grade teachers: http://www.fariafalcons.com/. Admittedly, it’s a bit dead now, but just the fact that they bought the domain and have all these cute, quirky link titles makes me smile. Good teachers at Faria (which is a good chunk of teachers there) care about their students. Being fortunate enough (or Asian enough) to have parents who care immensely about education, I was always placed with Faria’s absolute best teachers (there was a system for parents to request teachers at Faria, which looking back, sounds very bizarre to me). And so during all of my regular parent-teacher conferences, my teachers always pinpointed exactly the strengths and weaknesses that my little brain had any inkling of, and when they pointed out new ones, they always made sense.
In Waiting For Superman, one of the mothers spends days just trying to set one of these conferences up - and is met with someone else telling her that teachers try to avoid these meetings as much as possible. She was told over and over again by the teacher that her son was having trouble with comprehension, when he was clearly comprehending perfectly well in his two other after school programs. The lengths that she, and other parents like her in the film, had to go through just to reach some kind of understanding of her child’s education is unjustified. It’s a result of this bureaucracy of a system; as Michelle Rhee puts it, it’s not about the children - it’s about the adults.
California is a state that gets cited for a lacking education system, but I’ve somehow been fortunate enough to land in four of the top tier public schools. Waiting for Superman gives me the perspective to really appreciate what I have had and the opportunities my education has created for me. Thank you, Faria, for being one of the best that California public schools has to offer (‘:
