Culminating Experience

It seems that Scott and I had the same idea of interviewing someone from the McDonalds in the town the high school is located at, a mainstay in my dining repertoire. I don’t want to know the impact of this experience has been on the opinion of white northerners amongst the staff there.

Anyways, I ended up interviewing the woman who was on break. She seemed to be going along to be polite but wasn’t too enthused about answering my questions. He answers about her childhood and her own education (West High School) were positive but general. She was slightly more talkative about her job, and previous jobs. She said she enjoyed interacting with people there, and that any job, from making and serving fast food to manufacturing parts in a factory required the same skills. The only difference was one involved food and one involved parts.

She only became animated when we got on the subject of East HS. It turns out her daughter is a tenth grader there, and one of the majorettes in the band. The majorettes at EHS are not like any majorettes I ever saw before coming here. They don’t have batons, and if I tried to dance like that, I’d probably hurt myself. Her mother was obviously proud of her daughter, and mostly for her academic ambition. She said that her daughter had told her she was determined to go to a four-year school, not a community college. In particular, MSU and LSU. We then had a conversation that lasted about three times as long as the first part, all about what she should be doing now to help her daughter. Her mother was wondering if she should take her daughter to visit campuses herself and I strongly suggested she should. I said that for a teenager, the future can be pretty abstract, and actually seeing a campus could do a lot to motivate a student. I told her this was true for my Hmong kids, and it was true for me. I also said that she should take the PSAT seriously next year (she’d been chose to take it this year) because she might get mailings from places she wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. Her mother asked how she could prepare for the PSAT, SAT and ACT and I told her about those big prep books. Her mother had never heard of such a thing. Now, they are expensive, but it makes me sad to know that many students aren’t even aware that they are out there, when ever person I knew in high school had at least one. She asked where she could get one and I suggested any large bookstore – knowing that there aren’t any close to Sardis. I told her that if she had me next year, I would try to have a lot of ACT prep and that I would help her with admissions essays.

It really lit a fire under my butt when I saw Yale’s campus for the first time the summer before my sophomore year. I had a tangible goal – a nice gothic revival dorm.* I also had parents who made getting into college a priority AND knew a lot about the process. In my case, the intersection of my biography and my interviewee’s is clear. She is like my own parents in that her priority is her daughter, and her priority for her daughter is college. The difference is a lack of knowledge about the process, but hopefully I can help with that. I will probably have this student next year because she is apparently one of the smartest students in the 10^th grade, and I hopefully will have an honors class next year. This interaction recharged my determination to focus on the path to college, especially amongst my honors students.

* I ended up in a Georgian style residential college instead.