doing a disservice

working with kids is important to me. teaching them and playing with them brings back the exciting parts of my childhood, rekindles that childlike spirit i have in me that too many exams and papers have quashed. for some reason when i am working with them i feel like i have the power to change everything that is going wrong in their lives - preserving their childhoods for as long as possible. i try my best to help them, to be that role model they may not have. sometimes i feel like i would give anything for them. so it's only natural for me to feel hurt when one of them thinks i am not being fair to them.

the other day i had to talk to a student about his "bad" grades and "poor" behavior in one of his classes. when i told him that it was disrespectful for him to be rude to students in his classes and in our afterschool program he accused me of only being mean to him. when i asked him why he thought that, he said, "you're only punish me, but never punish so-and-so becasue he was born here." i literally became speechless. i never thought anyone would think that i would show favoritism. (trust me, i do my fair share of yelling and dealing out the punishments!) and then i realized it was less about me and him, and more about him and how he is seen as non-American , non-native, an immigrant, someone who "doesn't belong." in his eyes, what i do to him is somehow a reflection of his nationality and it's not because i show signs of racism or prejudice (as an african american female who stood in the face of racism, i am in no place to judge), it's how people have treated him in the past. the more i thought about it, the more i realized that it's not just him. over 95% of the students in my afterschool program speak english as a second language; those who immigrated to the U.S. where labeled as second-class citizens.

how am i to change this perception that he and so many others have? i talked to him about it the next day and settled the matter, but for others it may not be so easy to settle. how do I, we, stop this type of thinking of continuing? when did it start? As C.G. Jung stated in The Undiscovered Self, "Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche." from this statement, i can only conclude that it is the past oppression of others that pervaded into our society and have affected the psyches' of the young as well as the old. if only we could learn to raise ourselves up, the world would exist in an entirely different state of mind.