Mary Antin has a very personal story which stands out to me in the Frazer book. Her story happens to be one of success and not much turmoil. Mary excelled and learned much in the classroom thanks to her teachers. Her teachers are the best example of someone in a schooling environment who helped immigrant children attempt to succeed. They did not demoralize their immigrant students and some like Miss Nixon in this story took the extra time to organize and help the immigrant children in groups. To help Mary Ann and the other Jewish students succeed I would follow the same patterns as Miss Nixon and the other teachers she had. Evidently from this source, they greatly impacted her life in a positive light, and she has much appreciation for them.
The first step to helping these students succeed is to have patience and recognize their needs. Miss Dillingham assisted Mary Antin until she successfully could pronounce "water" and "village" separately (Frazer 178). Beyond being patient, I would find comparable ways to relate the classroom lessons back to Jewish culture or at least make their culture reliable to the lessons somehow. However, admittingly for the teachers, Americanization would be much easier. Americanization was the process of socializing immigrants into American culture in the belief America was vastly superior to their past culture (Urban 177). Of course, teaching today the Jewish children would be able to pray however they want in school. However, then [the past] I would likely join the bandwagon into laying out American education on them which heavily included Christian principles. Perhaps doing so would be the best way to quickly adapt them to what America was back then.
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AuthorI'm a learner of new things and a thinker of new ideas. Archives
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