East Los Angeles freshmen from Wilson High School share a day in their life.
By Christine O’Keefe
Staff Writer
UCLA Urban Schooling Professor Ernest Morrell, along with two graduate students, Rosa Jimenez and Mark Bautista, have partnered with first-year English teacher Veronica Garcia at Wilson High School to develop and implement a unique project called “A Day in the Life of…Critical Minds Project.” The project enables students to deepen their critical literacy skills through analysis of their own educational experiences. Using the genre of a written narrative, the students capture both the mundane and poignant aspects of their daily lives as they move from home to school and through the sequence of a typical high school day. In an era of rising dropout rates and increased legislative scrutiny, today’s students are often portrayed by the mainstream media as unmotivated and underachieving, but they are rarely given the opportunity to share their firsthand, unedited experiences. What follows is a day in the life of four freshman high school students at Wilson High School in East Los Angeles—in their own voices.
Leslie Tovar
"I am a Wilson High School student but I don't belong at Wilson—I belong at Huntington Park High School. I have to take a bus in the morning to get to Wilson. If you guys want to know why, it's because HPHS is too full. When I am driving to Wilson on the bus, I see a lot of things. In my opinion, I think the area around Wilson High is ghetto because there are a lot of people in the streets lying down. There is trash in streets and a lot of tagging on the walls. Huntington Park is better. It's not prettier, but it has less trash on the streets, fewer people lying down on the streets, and less tagging on the walls. But I still want to feel like I belong at Wilson and that the school wants me to stay.”
Read Leslie's original piece here.
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Ericka Gonzalez
"In my English class we never stop working, and even if we do something fun, we have to write about what we did. It gets really boring because we have that class for two hours. When my English teacher doesn't give us a break during passing periods it sucks because it doesn't pump us up for the next hour. Then we aren't awake for class. I think I have gotten better in English, though, because I have improved in my writing. I can write longer papers now than before. In most of my classes, though, my teachers lecture too much and I end up not learning anything. It's not fun to sit in a classroom and just listen, you don't learn anything."
Read Ericka's original piece here.
Aileen Carrero
"My second period class is Life Skills, which is about how to succeed in life. It's also about how to be a lady and a gentleman. One time Mr. G. smelled marijuana, so he smelled each of our hands and caught the boy. He was suspended for two days. He didn't look like he was the kind of kid who would get high—he looked like a good kid. When Mr. G. said he smelled pot I thought it would be one of the kids who really do drugs. Sadly lots of kids do drugs at my school and the administrators don't even have a clue. They do it because it's so easy to get away with it or because it makes them look cool. Others do drugs to get away from reality. Some kids give up because they are tired of having to be 'perfect' and live up to their parent and teacher's expectations."
Read Aileen's original piece here.
Mario Rosales
"In science class, the teacher gives us notes on the projector. I think I am learning in science because I study the notes and read the textbook. The students in the class are okay. A lot of kids mess around, for example, they walk around when they are not supposed to. To me it's not distracting, but I think it's distracting for other students. I read a chapter in Paulo Freire's Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach that is similar to my daily experience. Freire writes, 'If I'm really seriously reading, I can't go past the first page if I can't grasp its significance relatively clearly.’ This quote means that sometimes a lot of students study but can't understand what they're reading. They don't like to study, and when they want to, they can't. I think that's mostly their fault, but sometimes it's the teacher's fault."
Read Mario's original piece here.
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