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My first wow moment was on how segregated schools still exist in this country. I never really thought in depth of how obvious segregation still was in lower socioeconomic communities. School segregation is such a deeper issue than seeing it visually. Segregation has been caused over decades and decades of systematic policies that were designed to keep minorities on the lower end of the white hierarchy, and to this day the effects are still present. Slowly over generations of families are those reformed systems being washed away to a more equal nation.

My second wow moment was when the class was required to watch the movie “The 13th”, where I learned that the United States consists of 5% of the world’s population, yet holds one fourth of its prisoners. The ‘land of the free’ has the highest incarceration rate, which skyrocketed after the war on drugs and crime movements that were indirect ways to target minorities. It was shocking to believe that such movements were painted as heroic and just, were actually just ways to keep control and power in the white elite’s hands.

The third wow moment for me was in week 11 when we watched the prison video "The Feminist on Cell Block Y", on male dominant male masculinity. The story of the inmate who had a Hot Wheel thrown at his head, resulting in him beating him up badly and learning that violence was his way of gaining respect and power. That small event was what led him to a future of asserting physical violence as an answer to his problems, which brings a very negative meaning to the saying, “it’s the little things that count”. One little event could mean a world of difference in children.

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The course has influenced my future teaching in a way that is more knowledgeable on the importance of being culturally competent as an educator. Schools are becoming more and more diverse as the years go by, and with that, being the melting pot of the world, being culturally competent and culturally accepting is ever more crucial for the development of a more equitable country. Being culturally competent allows more than just one group of children to feel more comfortable and accepted.

The second way this course has influenced my future teaching was the idea of having multiple stations around the classroom. Keeping the interest of students is such an important quality to have in a classroom. A place where students enjoy learning that is both enriching and meaningful. Using multiple stations around a classroom with flexible seating would make for a fun way to keep students focused in multiple stations for smaller time increments as opposed to trying to stay focused for an hour and a half plus on one whole class topic seems very effective.

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If I had to choose one thing to change, it would be the powerpoint projects that also required audio. Although I had some technical difficulties during the semester, I still found the process of having to edit the powerpoint to make it look nice on top of recording audio for content that was already in the powerpoint slides very tedious. I spent about 30-40% of my time on the powerpoints editing when just a video recording or a short essay of sorts. I can see the idea of creating fun and colorful powerpoints for younger students as a teacher, but for the sake of time and efficiency in a college level course, it was very time consuming.

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a cute and simple book that is great for learning basic numbers and colors. This book would be for kindergartners who are still learning basic numbers and colors. The book can be interactive when it comes to counting, and portrays a good message on how eating healthy can make you feel good.

Same, Same But Different would be another book I’d use in the classroom. This book is perfect for cultural acceptance in terms of giving several different types of views on how different kids' home life might look compared to others. Students who come from a different culture compared to the majority can feel relieved and accepted when they see they’re type of home lifestyle being represented in a book. Reading this book to children will also help them understand that everyone is different and many of us come from different backgrounds, but in the end we’re all the same, but just different.

Lastly, The Sandwich Swap is another book that I would use for the 2nd to 4th grade level. This book expresses the importance of not judging a book by its cover through food. A huge part of culture is food. Using something universal like sandwiches was a great idea to show kids how to accept their differences and the differences of others before judging them, like both girls thinking the other’s sandwich looks gross, yet loving them in the end.

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Where the Wild Things Are was always a childhood staple for me. I loved the book, but never really understood the meaning of it, I just liked the cool pictures of the monsters. After doing a little research, I noticed it became a controversial book due to it being too traumatizing and dark for some kids, which I found a little dramatic. I do understand that sending a message about not eating dinner as a form of punishment is not okay, along with running away (going where the wild things are) as a form of rebellious behavior to getting in trouble.

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2. Check the Storyline

I found this criteria quite interesting when trying to apply it to the book. When trying to answer, “does it take white behavior to get ahead?”, I thought about the story and laughed. In the story Max, a white male, sails to a far off land and instantly becomes the king there. He commands the Wild Things and sends them away without dinner, then when he wanted to leave, he simply just left. After going to a foreign place and ruling it, he then left with ease back to his home place where there was a hot meal waiting for him. This to me sounded a lot like white colonialism.

3. Look at the Lifestyles

In the story, the boy, Max, does venture to an island forest that isn’t populated and could be argued to be a third world setting. The Wild Things don’t wear any clothes and don’t have any homes, but in the book's defense, Wild Beast in the wild don’t have clothes or built homes like humans do.

4. Weigh the relationship between people

In the story, the boy appears white and he is the one who has the power among the Wild Things, who appointed him as their king themselves. Other than the boy being made the king of the Wild Things, there is no other relationship aside from the brief one we see with his mother when he got sent to his room. This story doesn’t show any clear cut or hidden signs of racism or sexism. The Wild Things were all different colors and sizes, along with having different kinds of animal appearances as well.

9. Loaded Words

This book did not use any loaded words that were racist or sexist. Though you could say there were plenty of opportunities to use such terminology in a book about ‘Wild Things’, there was no trace of such vocabulary. This book did a good job of using descriptive words that didn’t have indirect, hidden meanings, at least from what I could tell.

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PBIS Learning Media is a website that I came across after my school that I work at had used the PBIS Reward system before picking up Class Dojo as a replacement. After researching more into PBIS, I learned that its WAY more than just a reward system for kids, but a resource for teachers as well. The website provides links to so many different kinds of resources that teachers can access. They also provide lots of training, such as behavioral, academic, parent connections, and so much more. This website is an excellent resource that I will use in the future if I need help with pretty much anything related to my students.

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PBIS Rewards is an affordable schoolwide PBIS management system that assists schools in their Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support program. The multi-device platform makes it easy to continuously recognize students for meeting behavior expectations from anywhere in the school, not just the classroom. And with added features like referral tracking, Check-In/Check-Out, and a teacher rewards system, PBIS Rewards helps to foster accountability and fidelity in your PBIS program.

Eliminate Paper Tickets & Increase Instructional Time!

No more fumbling around with torn up papers, cutting out reward documents, or keeping track of mountains of tickets. Go paperless with PBIS Rewards!

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Are you buried in paper tickets, tokens, and paws? Go digital with your schoolwide PBIS management. PBIS Rewards helps schools succeed with PBIS.

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Google Classroom works as the founding platform for all students to have a space where they can locate all of their school materials; homework, classwork, reminders, event dates, and as a place to ask questions when in need of help. Google Classroom works as a social media platform in a sense that you can post and reply to things, along with customizing it in some ways that suit your personality all while being monitored by a teacher.

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Class Dojo works as a secondary website for a lot of the teachers that use the reward/point system it has. Classes can earn ‘Dojo Points’ that amount to different prizes, so students have lots of incentives to work towards if they so desire. The website also uses silly characters so it works fairly well for younger primary grades in terms of popularity. The 6th graders I work with don’t really care for them, but their teacher like the Dojo Points so she lives by it. It always cracks me up.

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ClassDojo helps teachers, parents, and students build amazing classroom communities.

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This movie was such an eye-opener, but also a heart-breaker. The amount of important information that isn't taught in the classroom, such as the corrupt history this country has, is hard to comprehend. History is sugarcoated in the classroom and hides harsh truths. Videos like this, in my opinion, should be mandatory in middle-school and high school.

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This video genuinely choked me up. It was disgusting seeing capitalism work in the worst way. The illegal installation of a pipeline in a river that millions of people depend on at a cheap cost, all for profit. This was during a time where mass media was able to bring light to such incidents, whereas if such technology didn't exist, this would have been another event brushed under the rug of US history.

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What Really Happened at Standing Rock | I Was There

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This video was so enlightening and down to earth. These kinds of videos are great for cultural competency. The women made the video fun, funny, and educational at the same time. This would be a video I show to 5th and 6th graders who can comprehend the terminology and concepts.

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Do All Muslim Women Wear a Hijab? ft. Fareeha Khan | Decoded | MTV

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The Model Minority Myth is a great representation of how racism can be used in ways that don't appear negative or hateful, when in reality can be very hurtful and damaging. It's important for teachers to understand that having high expectations and standards for one race over another is racist and very inappropriate. The minority myth traps many Asian Americans on a path that is so narrow due to the expectations of society and parents at home, limiting them to few open doors in life that they would otherwise like to explore.

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When I was halfway through the 11th grade, my pre-calculus teacher pulled me out into the hallway. He wanted to talk about my latest test. "You can do better than this," he said. "I'm so surprised by grades like this from someone like you."

Someone like you? I'd never done particularly well in his class, so the implication of his words churned in my stomach. In that moment, I felt acutely the weight of the dark braid trailing down my back and the glasses slipping down my nose.

I knew my performance was being evaluated not against my own earlier work but against the image of the perfect, straight-A, Asian student who lived in my teacher's mind: the myth of the "model minority."

What Is the Model Minority Myth?

The myth of the model minority is based in stereotypes. It perpetuates a narrative in which Asian American children are whiz kids or musical geniuses. Within the myth of the model minority, Tiger Moms force children to work harder and be better than everyone else, while nerdy, effeminate dads hold prestigious-but not leadership -positions in STEM industries like medicine and accounting.

This myth characterizes Asian Americans as a polite, law-abiding group who have achieved a higher level of success than the general population through some combination of innate talent and pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps immigrant striving.

What's So Bad About the Model Minority Myth?

While most people agree that negative stereotypes of Asian Americans are harmful, some still question the harm of the model minority myth. What could be so bad about being part of a group that's seen as being successful?

Like all stereotypes, the model minority myth erases the differences among individuals.

My own 11th-grade experience offers one example. My mother is Malaysian Chinese; my dad is white. I am usually perceived as Asian. So, because of the model minority myth, my failure to reach an expected level of achievement in math was attributed to some kind of deficiency or lack of effort on my part.

Instead of differentiating for me like I saw him do with others in the class, my teacher let me continue to slip. I was not offered extra help or any other support, and I did not know how to live up to the image of the model minority student. I stopped trying.

While I was eventually able to overcome this negative self-image, many others are not. Asian American college students have higher rates of attempting suicide than those in other groups. The model minority myth hides the pressures and paradoxes inherent within an Asian American identity. If you don't fit into the myth, it is hard to find your place at all.

The model minority myth ignores the diversity of Asian American cultures.

Data about Asian American achievement typically lumps this diverse population together into a singular group. Taken as a whole, it shows that Asian Americans tend to hold higher degrees and earn larger incomes than the general population. These successes are often attributed to differences in family attitudes toward education. From these metrics and attributions, the stereotype emerges that Asians are winning in their pursuit of the American Dream. But when we break these numbers down, the myth begins to crack.

Take pay disparities, for example. For every dollar the average white man makes in the United States, an Asian Indian woman makes $1.21 and a Taiwanese woman makes $1.16. A Samoan woman makes $0.62. A Burmese woman makes 50 cents. The experiences of these groups are not the same.

The model minority myth operates alongside the myth of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners.

The model minority myth is just one of a collection of stereotypes about Asian American people. Popular television and films exoticize Asian culture and peoples. If you're a man, you're a kung fu master. If you're a woman, you're a submissive sex object. If you're gender non-binary or transgender, you don't exist at all. Mickey Rooney's racist portrayal in Breakfast at Tiffany's lives in our collective imagination alongside every East or South Asian actor who has played a bit part as a humorless doctor or IT guy.

Buried under these stereotypes, the message is clear: Asian Americans are all the same-and all different from other Americans. On one hand, Asian Americans are often perceived as having assimilated better than other minority groups. On the other hand, Asian Americans are seen as having some foreign quality that renders them perpetual outsiders.

It's a paradox familiar to every Asian American who regularly faces the question, "But where are you from, originally?"

The model minority myth erases racism against Asian Americans.

Positioning Asian Americans as beneficiaries of the bounty of the American Dream, the myth of the model minority ignores the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese internment in the 1940s. It suggests that the U.S. has always been a welcoming place for people of Asian descent, in spite of the mass lynchings of Asian Americans in the 19th century and the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982.

The myth persists in spite of the fact that 1 in 7 Asian immigrants in America today is undocumented and facing potential deportation, a fact that is repeatedly overlooked in our national conversation about immigration. The model minority myth says Asian Americans are doing well today and must therefore have benefitted from an elevated status among people of color, in spite of centuries of systematic discrimination.

The model minority myth is harmful to the struggle for racial justice.

The myth says that Asian Americans have played within the rules of the American system to their own group benefit. The success of some groups of Asian American immigrants is often held as an example toward which other groups should strive. It suggests that Asian Americans are doing well and that if other groups would only work harder, have stronger family bonds and get over their histories of oppression, they too would succeed.

When paired with racist myths about other ethnic or racial groups, the model minority myth is used as evidence to deny or downplay the impact of racism and discrimination on people of color in the United States. Given the history of that impact on Black Americans particularly, the myth is ultimately a means to perpetuate anti-Blackness.

The model minority myth pits people of color against one another and creates a hierarchy in which Asian people are often represented at the top. By putting people of color in competition with one another, the myth distracts us from striving together toward liberation for all.

Dismantling the Myth

Understand that the collective is important while individual differences still exist.

The term Asian American was coined in the late 1960s as a means of harnessing the collective power of people of Asian origin, much in the same way the term was first used. Asian American political identity was strongly inspired by the Black Liberation Movement. Today, more inclusive terms like Asian-Pacific American (APA) or Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) signal the continued need for collective striving against similar experiences of racism and imperialism within our various ethnic subgroups. This collective political identity remains important.

At the same time, focusing solely on collective identity can perpetuate the model minority myth: The experiences of the most visible Asian American ethnic groups can hide the experiences of other groups.

Some studies of educational achievement have shown that certain Asian ethnic groups, particularly those from parts of East and South Asia, indeed score very well in some subject areas. When students from these groups consistently do better than even white students, it is easy for educators to take inherently biased actions based on a belief that all Asian students are innately intelligent and hardworking. Those same studies, however, reveal that other Asian ethnic groups have vastly different results. For example, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander students in particular often underperform when compared with all other racial and ethnic groups.

As an educator, it is important to understand the different histories and experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander students and communities. Some of these communities arrived in America as refugees escaping war or genocide, and some were imported as sharecroppers to replace enslaved people of African descent after the Civil War. Still other communities, particularly those native to various Pacific Islands, were here long before white settler colonialism. As educators, we must unlearn the biased, simplistic beliefs that we might hold about what it means to be Asian American or Pacific Islander in order to better attend to the real needs of our students and communities.

Feature Asian American figures and texts in your classroom.

One of the commonly felt experiences of Asian Americans is that of being invisible or erased. The model minority myth means that neither our historical struggles nor activism tend to be covered in schools and classrooms. The significant underrepresentation of Asian American educators furthers this problem.

Asian American and Pacific Islander history has been a part of American history for centuries. May is AAPI Heritage Month. Use this as a starting point, but do not limit your conscious inclusion of AAPI people and experiences to a single month. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders comprise the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States. We must make a conscious effort to represent these stories and people in our classrooms, regardless of our own identities and those of our students.

Raise awareness in yourself and others.

There may be names and examples in this piece with which you were unfamiliar. Learn about activists like Grace Lee Boggs, Larry Itliong and Yuri Kochiyama. Say the name of Vincent Chin. Teach your students about Ela Bhatt. Research Supreme Court cases like U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind and .

Dive into data to help understand the collective and individual experiences of various AAPI groups. Check your own biases and assumptions. Do not let a student like me slip through the cracks because you expect her to be smarter or more studious than her classmates.

As you raise your own awareness, you'll help those around you to understand and dismantle the model minority myth as well.
Blackburn is a professional development trainer for Teaching Tolerance.

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The myth of the "model minority" is pervasive. It does real damage. And Asian American students aren't the only ones it harms.

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Sexual harassment is an issue that seems brushed over a lot of times in school. Surprisingly, elementary schools can be a big culprit of that. Young students that are just hitting the stages of puberty also often don't know how to control their hormones. Verbally harassing other students sexually is a problem that I've seen several times firsthand where students genuinely think it's okay to make crude comments and make their classmates feel uncomfortable because "they're just joking". With that, I believe it's very important for teachers not to brush acts like that off either because "they're just kids", or "they didn't mean it". If there were stricter consequences and rules around sexual harassment at school, it would be less of an issue.

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The critical race theory was an interesting topic to discuss and critically think about. The idea of critical race theory is incredibly important for students to learn and understand harsh truths that are otherwise hidden. At the same time, I don't think such an intense topic would be appropriate for minds that aren't mentally developed enough to critically think  yet. I also don't believe it would be a great idea to introduce critical race theory to young primary children who are easily swayed to most concepts and teaching their teachers' provide them. At a middle school to high school level, and especially at a college level, I believe critical race theory is an important part of history that all individuals should understand.

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UPDATE: School board in Orange County bans teaching of ‘critical race theory’

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