A Cultural Experience

Some years ago, as I taught a kindergarten class in Arizona for most of a month, I thought a lot about Stephanie.
Stephanie was polite, interested, clearly bright enough to handle English as her second language already in kindergarten, and spoke with no accent.
Stephanie was also the person some of the children complained about most in class.
"Stephanie keeps bothering me"
"Stephanie is sitting too close to me"
"Stephanie is looking at my paper"

The mother of Allison, (one of the students who shared the table with Stephanie) asked me to move her daughter away from Stephanie.
Later I found this mother and told her:
"I don't see Stephanie being bad, I see her being Asian, from a culture where they have a smaller personal space. I'm sure she feels uncertain about some instructions she may hear in English, and I'll bet your daughter has been helpful to her as Stephanie "decodes" those instructions.
You may also note she has pretty thick gasses, she may look at her classmate's papers because they're easier to see close up than the chalkboard..."

So, I shuffled around the order for "Star of the Week" and put Stephanie as the next "Star." I called her father and asked if he might come in and talk to the class about Stephanie, and a little of the country they came from.
It turns out that her father was an instructor pilot with the F-16 group from Taiwan at Luke Air Force Base. He brought posters, a book on Chinese theater, and money to look at and hold. We tasted a Chinese candy and got F-16s stickers. We saw the homework Stephanie could do in Chinese and how to pronounce her name "I-Ting" in Chinese.
The next day, we reviewed some of the things we had learned in the visit, and made a class book "What I Liked Best Was…"
We read the book together several times, then sent it home with Stephanie as a thank you to her father.

Later that day I saw 2 of the girls in class take Stephanie by the hand and go off on the playground.

At the time, I felt I had done a good thing to smooth cultural difficulties. I wrote the incident up for a Bilingual Education Class and my note at the end was "Perfect"

Looking back, I am a little embarrassed at my conceit, thinking I had solved this problem...
I am now struck by the courage and patience little Stephanie showed in coming to school. I remember her father telling me that she had cried for 6 months when she first arrived. How the parents met have agonized as they sent her off to school again and again. I wonder if the parents battled resentment as they saw her remarkable accomplishment in English go unnoticed, and wonder if they wanted to "show those people who they're dealing with." To be an instructor in an F-16 group is no small thing, and I think again at how Stephanie's father was absolutely gentle in his presentation perfectly at kindergarten level, with no evidence of arrogance. I wish I could see how they are doing now. Stephanie is probably winning all the prizes in university :)