Yorktown High School

Journal 8
July 23, 2007
Yorktown High School

Yorktown High School is a very special school. There are more students from different countries than those in the other schools we have ever visited.
The first class of observation was Miss Mary Madden’s class. The students had already finished their writings. Miss Madden asked Alison, Jenny,and I to help her correct the students’ assignments. The boy next to me gave me his writing to read. In addition to some minor grammatical errors, he did a good job. The boy’s topic was “when I was a little boy”. He clearly expressed what happened between him and his father. His father always encouraged him to be brave and study hard. He often played soccer with his friends in his hometown. However in the States, he has to work after school, so he cannot attend the school team. He hopes that some day he will play soccer again. When I corrected his writing, he was very happy to find some word spellings that he couldn’t figure out. Another girl is very shy but she loved to share her writing with me. To my surprise, she is only seventeen years old but she has one daughter. She got a baby when she was 15! I can’t imagine how her life is going! She wrote she didn’t pay attention to her school when she was young. She just fooled around all day with boys. Now she lives with her mother and has to raise her own baby. Some of my teenager students don’t have a good achievement in school and the teachers also lack of patience with them. They don’t have any confidence in themselves and fool around on campus.
The second class of observation was Mr. Bruce Merrill’s class. The students formed a circle and discussed the storybook they read. After the class, I’m very surprised that they had lunch at 11:05 and the school provided some desserts for the students. There were a tuna can, cookies, peanuts, juice, and chocolate milk in the box. I was wondering why they had lunch so early and I asked one student, Jose Pineda, He said he had breakfast at 6:00, so he was hungry now. He was from Honduras and he also had to work after school. He and some of his classmates are the beginning learners in English. Gary comes from Bolivia and Douglass comes from El Salvador, in Central America. They even pointed out the location in the map for me and I also showed them the location of Taiwan on the map. One boy, Tony, comes from China and he introduced himself to me. His parents work in China Embassy and he has lived here for two years. His parents thought the schools in Arlington were not good enough for him to read. Yorktown high school is good so they chose this neighborhood to live. The boy has a good living environment and the parents have good gobs. He has a sense of superiority and no doubt he likes to show off.
I had a short chat with the boy, Gary, He had a lot of pressure of living in the States and he said that different cultures and different living styles made people hard to accommodate themselves.
“If you have a good chance to stay here, would you choose to live here?” he asked.
I said, “No. I have a good gob, family and a wonderful husband in my country. When I’m finished my study after five weeks, I will go home quickly”
He was a little surprised. I don’t understand why these young men leave their own countries. I can figure that it is not easy for them to fit into a totally strange living environment.