When you’re growing up in a poverty-stricken background, life IS a struggle, especially when you don’t KNOW how to pull yourself back up from under, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
The days ended early in the cold winters, at around five in the afternoons, the streetlamps were already, turned on. The students dragged their tired bodies, with their backpacks behind them, on their ways home. And yet, there are still students, who were, forced to stay late in school, to be mandatorily tutored by the school teachers, Yao is one of these kids.
His Chinese teacher and I are already stressed out over his scholastic performances, and we had both, zoomed in on him as he finished his assignments as we watched over him, then, we’d, driven him home ourselves. His homeroom teacher told me, that Yao may need to be placed in the special education for him to receive the help in schoolwork that he was needing, that she will sent him to take the tests for it, but, he’d not passed the requirements. Yao needed to stay in his regular classes, learn with the rest of his cohort, and this had proven to be, quite difficult for him.
During class, I’d, observed him especially, it wasn’t that he couldn’t get the materials, it’s just that he gets distracted easily, and that when he got home, nobody watches him as he finishes his assignments. The counselor told us, that Yao was raised by his grandparents, the grandparents needed to work very hard to put food on the table, to even have the time to check his homework assignments, and they’d told me, that they planned to send him to the factories to work like they’d done his uncle after middle school, so there’s no need for him to study that hard.
I was very sad after I’d heard, perhaps, the backgrounds we’re born in determines half of our lives, and the other half relies on the education we receive, if Yao continues to be lazy, then, I can’t even imagine how bad his future will be. I’d called Yao to me, asked him, if he wanted to or liked going to the factory to work? He’d told me that he didn’t, not really, because it’s very tiresome, but he knew he wasn’t intelligent enough, and didn’t know what he could do after he got out of school.
“Yao, I think you’re very intelligent, you can learn. You shouldn’t be so lazy, and, your grandparents were having it hard, taking care of you too, don’t you need to empathize on how hard they’re working, to raise you? And, if you don’t work hard for yourself, wouldn’t that be doing them wrong? If you start working hard right now, I have faith, that your future will be quite different, am I making any sense?”
Yao kept his head lowered, without saying a word, I don’t know how much of what I said he’d understood. There are, quite a lot of kids like him in the schools, the educators on the frontlines are always engaged in a tug-of-war with their families of origins. I don’t know how much force I will be able to exert, just hoped, that they won’t have it hard in their futures.
And so this is the tug-of-war between nature AND nurture, and, looks like nurture is winning, because NO kid wants to fail in anything, it’s the systems, the adult world, that’s MADE them into failures, and this teacher is doing the best that she possibly can, to give this young man a pull that he’d needed, but, it seemed, that she’s the only one using as much forces as she possibly can, to pull this young man up, and the young man wanted to get pulled up to, it’s just, that he hadn’t, found his own strength, to help his teacher pull him back up too!
Life, the Obstacle Course 