But I Smile Anyway…

Another older post of mine…

It’s always an interesting life in a multicultural school….. The way an educational institution changes with the advent of a new culture, a new people entering its walls.  And the differences of why the school has to change to cater for these children.

I feel this keenly, as an educator in the local school.  A huge difference with then, when the Indians flocked over here, and now with the arrival of the many Eastern European families, which other colleagues of mine have echoed, was the ethos of the Indian parents and their children.  There was a hunger to learn, to better themselves, and the parents were there right behind their children, sometimes a bit too much! But everyone wanted their child to be something, to go to university, make a name for themselves, as their parents had done before them.  A child with not much English would arrive at the school but with some help, would integrate, and learn what they needed to, and go on to learn at the pace of the others.

Now, however, the issue we have is that there are all these children from various Eastern European countries coming, with very little basic education, or knowledge, very little English, and parents who don’t have the capacity to help their own children to fit in, as they don’t have the education behind them themselves.  No English, and just the promise from someone, that coming to England will make your dreams come true…

Before you think I might be being a tad racist, no, I’m not. In India and Kenya, I have experienced this very same thing from family members, and their thinking.  We work hard here, save money, and go to spend holidays with our families back home, only for them to see our material possessions, like phones and cameras, or nice clothes, and some money to go shopping, and think that ‘this is it, we need to get there, this is what we can do then, live like kings!’

Ok, yes it might seem like that, but no, we don’t just sit at home, money doesn’t just pour into our accounts.  We plan for months, years even, to go home and have a good trip, slogging our guts out sometimes, so we can relax back home.  In fact, when I look at the lifestyles some of our families have back home, it makes me wonder why our parents came over here in the first place!  There is someone to cook and clean, most of the women I encounter aren’t working, from affluent families, and can afford to lead a ‘ladies who lunch’ lifestyle. And the men have the  money behind them from their own parents who would have built their own businesses from scratch, so their children would have security.

Going back to the Eastern Europeans, I won’t tar everyone with the same brush.  We have Polish, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Hungarian, Czech children amongst others, who do come, they have a great capacity for learning, and after a while, they get there.  They have parents who want to learn too, and are willing their children to succeed here, so they too, can have a comfortable life.  It is the Roma children, those from the traveller communities of these same countries, which are the hardest work.  And again, it’s not their fault they can’t learn well, and integrate.  For as start, they don’t have a written language, so how much reading and writing is going on at home?  These people were often persecuted back in their home countries, treated like third class citizens, and not given any opportunities, so coming here, they don’t like to admit their backgrounds, not realising that at school, the more knowledge we have of a child’s background, the more help we can get financially to cater for these children’s needs.

I have been working in a school that has a high percentage of non-English speaking pupils for 4 years now, and it’s an interesting experience!  I’ve learned a lot, I’ve had to learn a lot, so we can communicate with all these children.  I’ve also got to know a lot of them, as they get older, and it pleases me so much to see one of them grasp a concept that they have struggled with, as much as it pleases me when any of my pupils succeeds, it just has an extra tinge of happiness, as for a lot of these children, learning is a hard thing… school is tough for them, alien words being thrown at them, and concepts which they probably haven’t even encountered in their mother tongue, let alone a new language.

Another thing is that there is no real settling for them.  We get children joining us, and we work hard to help them, and just as the child is adjusting, getting to grips with the school, and learning, the family move as their might be ‘better’ opportunities elsewhere, only for them to come back 6 months later, having forgotten what they had learned previously, if they hadn’t been in school all that time.

For a lot of the parents of these children, school is just a formality for their kids, if they are to live here.  It’s not a necessity, but this thinking only stems from the fact that there was no emphasis on education in their own formative years. Indeed, many of them wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to go to a decent school when they were growing up, and if they did, they would have been segregated from the ‘normal’ children, and treated so badly.

I have well qualified Eastern European colleagues who have lived this life, not as Roma people, but ‘proper’ nationals of the various countries and they tell us of the persecutions that happen to the Roma communities back home.  They only wish for the best for these children, and their families but they echo our frustrations, as they can see the difficulties of educating children who have no support at home.

When I see the children out and about, out of school hours, {and I’m talking really out of hours,} young children as young as 6-7 with no adults around them, lingering about in town, after dark, it makes me wonder what their parents must be thinking… leaving the kids out, alone, at that time. They tell us, yawning, that they were up until 1am, watching some inappropriate films, or playing the wrong kind of computer games.  so when they show they can throw an impressive punch, or pepper their pigeon English with some ‘colourful’ words, you know it’s not mum and dad’s influence, but some Hollywood action hero. Where were mum and dad?

So you see, it’s not just about education, and educating the kids, somewhere, somehow, we have to educate the parents too, to show them they are worth something, and with support, they can push their own children to greater heights than they thought achievable themselves.