Woman of the Ghetto

 As a wise woman once said who went by the name of Marlena Shaw claimed, "I was born and raised in the Ghetto." Coming from the West lines of metropolitan Sydney, I was raised in a suburb called Cabramatta, once well known for it’s infamous youth gangs and drug dealing of heroin.

Obviously cleaned up now, Cabramatta was a gold mine of apparent "disadvantaged youth" and I was apart of that statistic.

Our pile-on of refugees allowed a whole new generation of Australian born Vietnamese-Chinese-Cambodian etc. children. My school had an apparent 97% language background other than English according to the MySchool website. I for one can assure you that it was more like 100%.

The environment I was schooled in felt very different from what I saw on TV, I was surrounded by Asians, in a way it may correlate with the idea of same sexed schools, instead its same race. Almost all my peers understood the state we were living in and all grew up with an Asian tradition. We all held hands (metaphorically) on Chinese New Years laughing at our parents strange traditions, I never realised until I came to university the different experiences students had, I mean I was in a state of shock when I found out that other races didn't need to take their shoes off when they walked into a room.

This is when a stereotype kicks in.

In reflection to education, the population and culture really altered our learning.

By year 11 we all knew that English was compulsory and Math’s was optional.

Math’s (sadly) became compulsory at my school, this was because almost all students has chosen math, and during that period when we were all in class learning things like Algebra and Trig, the small percentage of our grade who didn’t want it didn’t know what to do during this hour or two. That was a problems because teachers didn’t know where to put those students so..

Students were told to bare one year of math’s and the only option was to drop it by year 12.

I don’t want to sound racist, but the reason for the boom in math’s students was the fact that our parents wanted us to do it, I hated math’s with a fury but I was forced into it, like many others of my peers. This was because our parents believed that if you succeeded in math’s you would succeed in life, because in reality eastern parents are more self-critical and concerned with social image (Wang and Casillas, 2012).

Another impact my schooling had on my education was the popular subject of Modern History.

As you may know that you are given a number of sub-topics to study in "Conflict in pacific regions"

My history told me we were to do “Conflict in Indo-china”, why? Because she told us that our students benefitted from it because of our background, telling us that we have a more hands on feel for the course and connect to it more. Another reason was that it wasn’t the most studied topic in the HSC, meaning a lower number of competition, thus meaning we have an advantage, in a way catering to our low SES.

As you can see, the extensive amount of second generation Australian born students in my schooled altered our tracks in learning form, due to our backgrounds, Math’s was compulsory and the sub-topic. 

References

http://www.myschool.edu.au/

H.-T. Wang and N. Casillas, Asian American Parents' Experiences of Raising Children with Autism: Multicultural Family Perspective Journal of Asian and African Studies, October 1, 2013; 48(5): 594 - 606.