Even though I was only behind two weeks, I am so glad that I am finally caught up on my blogs again. Trust me when I say it was not fun trying to play catch up. As of now, my project is going pretty smoothly. The poor quality of public education is the issue of my concern. My project involves improving the quality of education through voting and through a few minor changes that will be made on the way things are done in the school. Last week I was able to send letters to a member of Congress representing the state of Louisiana, the mayor of New Orleans, the superintendent of New Orleans public schools, and a principle of a New Orleans public school. At the moment, I am just waiting for some responses and thinking of ways to execute at least some part of my project. I already know that I will not get a direct response from the majority of the people that I wrote letters to, but that is the least of my worries. My main concern about the week 8 blogs is that I would not receive any responses at all. As of now, everything is being centered around the elections, so my project will probably be the furthest thing on their minds. Having this mindset for the past week, I was surprised at what I found in my email on Wednesday. I received a letter from a representative of Mayor Ray Nagin’s office. I was a little disappointed that it was not the mayor himself, but at least I received some kind of response. Now if the mayor can write me back, surely the superintendent and a principle can do the same. As for the Congress member, I still have my doubts. Because he is the only one actually running for an office, he is probably extremely busy preparing for last minute campaigns and other election-related activities. As I said earlier, now that the letters are out, I am thinking of ways to help promote some aspects of my project. Now that the registering process is over, it is important that people be encouraged to get up and actually go out to the polls and vote for themselves. In my opinion, that is the most difficult process voting. With this supposedly being the biggest election in history, I suppose every vote does count. I have signed up as a volunteer with an organization that will be encouraging citizens to vote. I heard about this organization through the Xavier premed office. The email stated that volunteers were needed to help promote the “get out and vote” effort, and I thought this would be very good for me to join. I still have not received any further information from the director, so we will see how that goes. I am really counting on responses from the superintendent of New Orleans public schools, as well the New Orleans principle that I wrote, so that I can see where improvements should be made in my project. I particularly want feedback from these two because I plan on sending my ideas to other principles in the district, hoping they will take my ideas into consideration. If these ideas do not work, I do not really know what else I will be able to do. I just read the blog of a student from a different section dealing with the voting issue. She was talking about how you can write a blog on John Kerry’s website at http://www.johnkerry.com/index.html. I think I am going to do that. Because the blog will be open to anybody on that website, that would give me a good opportunity to receive a number of comments from people all over the country, which would be really helpful. Thank you to the person who posted that blog.
My project reminds me of an English assignment that I have done. In class we discussed the issue of assimilation. We read different writings of authors concerning their opinions towards assimilation. I remember one of the authors saying that complete assimilation is necessary to survive in a dominant society, whereas a couple of other authors said that complete assimilation was not necessary to survive in a dominant society. In some ways I agreed with the first author, but in other ways I agreed more with the other authors that complete assimilation is not necessary in a dominant society. Here is the essay that I wrote concerning my opinion on assimilation in a dominant society:
America has become known as the Amelting pots of the world. The many different cultures and ethnic groups have helped shape America with the uniqueness it has today. To me, assimilation is the changing of one culture to fit in with the dominant culture. Because everybody benefits from other cultures one way or another, I believe that complete assimilation is not necessary to succeed and fully participate in American society.
Each minority group in American society has and/or continues to contribute some aspect of its culture to the dominant American culture. Whether its food, clothes, or literature, it all plays a key role in society. The fact that American society is built from a variety of cultures reveals the importance of every culture and not just one dominant culture.
In order for a population of diverse cultures to communicate, a common language must be shared. However, I believe that a culture has the ability to keep its language and learn the dominate language also. In her essay, bell hooks describes the necessity of a culture keeping its natural language:
To deny ourselves daily use of speech patterns that are common and familiar, that embody the unique and distinctive aspect of our self is one of the ways we become estranged and alienated from our past. (Hooks 25)
From Richard Rodriguez, we learn that a language is what creates a bond of intimacy between members of a similar culture (302). As long as members of a culture maintain a balance between his/her natural language with the shared language among the American society, assimilation is by no means necessary.
Because assimilation requires a complete change, a minority culture is bound to lose its identity. You have to do one thing or the other; you can\’t do both. If one attempted to adopt two different cultures, one culture is bound to be more dominant than the other. Therefore I do not think that it is possible for a culture to assimilate without losing or compromising its racial, ethnic, or cultural identity.
Works Cited
hooks, bell. AKeeping Close to Home: Class and Education.@ Breaking Boundaries. Carol Comfort. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2000. 217-229.
Rodriguez, Richard. AAria.@ Breaking Boundaries. Carol Comfort. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2000. 299-308.
As I said earlier, I felt that this discussion, and my essay had a lot to do with my project in many ways. In one aspect, in order for my project to work, those involved with the project, meaning the students, teachers, and parents, would have to assimilate to my project. This, however, goes against my argument in my essay. In this case, complete assimilation must be achieved or else nothing will get done. How would it look if for example, only a couple of students were doing what was required of them, whereas other students were doing their own thing. The amount of student participation is one of the reasons that wealthy public schools are more advanced than poor public schools. Due to the smaller class size in wealthy public schools, students are more attentive and are able to learn the material faster, thus giving them an advantage to those students in poor public schools. The advantage comes from the fact that many schools are rewarded monetary gifts based on how well their students do mainly on different standardized tests. Students in poor public schools are most likely placed in classes that have a higher student to teacher ratio, therefore the teacher can not keep up with what everybody is doing, leading to many more class disturbances. Due to the increased number of disturbances, more time is focused on calming the class down rather than teaching the materials that need to be learned, causing the class to fall behind on class work. Once students begin falling behind on class work, they are more likely to not do so well on the required standardized tests administered by the state. It is often heard on the news about the latest schools who had a high number of student failures on a test and now they can not move on to the next grade, or in most cases graduate. So it is very important that all teachers, students, and parents be on the same track so some changes can be effectively made.
It will be very difficult to get every single teacher, every single student, and every single parent on the same page. First of all, teachers have their own teaching methods and their own style of teaching, so take that away from them will cause much chaos I’m sure. So, from this standpoint, assimilation is not necessary, just as long as the teachers are teaching the same materials and are going at the same pace. It will be hard to get students on the same page for almost the same reason. For one, everybody learns at a different pace. Some students grasp concepts faster and better than others, thus creating a learning gap. Also, students learn faster and better depending on the way the teacher presents the materials. So, again, assimilation is not necessary from this standpoint. Finally, concerning the parents, it is harder for some parents to participate in their child’s education than it is for other parents. Some parents have a busier work schedule than others, so they probably will not be at home as much. Now that I think about it, this is also a factor probably affecting the gap between wealthy public schools and poor public schools. Students attending wealthy public schools most likely have more wealthier parents than those attending poor public schools, which probably means parents with children attending wealthy public schools have regular eight to four jobs, Monday through Friday, with yearly salaries, whereas more parents with children attending poor public schools probably have jobs throughout the week, with pay based on the number of hours worked.
It is sad that things have to be like this, but that is where I come in. Somehow I need to devise a way where students of public schools can get the same advantages as students attending wealthy public schools. The only thing that I can think of at the moment as to how this can get started is if poor public schools get the same resources as wealthy public schools. By this I mean approximately the same number of qualified teachers and the same amount of funds. The thing about this is that it involves money. Nowadays, money more hard to come across than anything, and I do not think the state is going to up and start handing out money to every public school that needs it. I realize that school funding has a lot to do with the amount of money brought in by the city in which the school is located in. Because money is hard to come across, this is one reason why I have had to turn away from trying to help schools get funded. So as I was saying, I must find a way to get teachers, parents, and students on the same track.
If I’m not mistaken, I believe all teachers are supposed to have the same teaching plan, so that every student will be learning the same information. It might be interesting to find out how many teachers following the same plan are actually on the same track. I still have just a little more time to think up something, but I know it will be very difficult because I lot needs are going to have to be met.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2004 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Project Progress, Week 09: Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.