Hi, my name is Lara H and I am from here in Rapid City.
I graduated from Rapid City Christian High School and then attended college at South
Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I love South Dakota. My family is here.
My future is here. I love the land, and I love the people. For a short period
of my life, from when I was eight until I was 14, I lived in the Bay Area of
California, and that time gave me a great appreciation for the way that people
here have time for and are interested in each other’s lives. However, as I grew
older, I began to notice some things that made me ask questions. Why, when I
was riding the bike path, were there often older, native men sleeping under the
bridges? Why did I hear people making racist jokes about Natives Americans? Why
did people that I respected talk about Native Americans in a mostly
depreciating way? What was it about this group that caused them to be so
different?
As I sought out these answers I realized that I couldn’t judge a
whole group of people based on the few that I had encountered. In fact, I
didn’t really notice a native person unless they were doing something that I
found to be out of “the norm.” During college, as my awareness of native issues
increased, I began to realize that there truly was a disparity between my
quality of life and the quality of life of many Native American people. I
didn’t take any classes that were informative of Native American issues, but I
did live in a part of town with a high density of Native American residents.
The struggles that many of my neighboring families faced daily was evident and
disturbing. Although I never wanted for anything when I was under my parents
roof, during college I realized from first hand experience how having little
money can be a cyclic issue, even if you are careful with your spending. Thankfully
I knew that I would soon be getting my degree and moving beyond minimum wage
jobs. That is when I realized that one extremely significant difference between
me and my neighbors was that I was soon going to be educated, thus allowing me
to move out of the neighborhood and have a job that could more than pay for my
bills.
When I realized this, my heart went out to the native people
that I had seen living hard lives. I knew that I wanted to change things, to
just make it all better, but that is not how life works. By chance, or by fate,
the chair of the mathematics department at SDSM&T mentioned Teach For
America to me during the September of my senior year. After looking at their
website, I realized that I didn’t have to be alone in my efforts to provide a
means to increased quality of life for these people that I didn’t know, but had
come to have compassion, not pity, for. After joining Teach For America and
moving out to Mission, on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, I came to know
these people, the Sicangu Lakota, on a deeper level. My student’s families have
invited me to their participate in their sacred traditions such as inipis, they
have taken me horse back riding, and they have fed me dinner.
Being in the classroom as a teacher was at first a new
experience for me. I was a teaching assistant for college algebra while I was
at the School of Mines, but teaching college students and teaching freshmen in
high school are two different things completely! For the first time in my life
I was enforcing rules rather than following them, and I was solely responsible
for the development of the bright young minds in my room. It was challenging to
figure out when misbehaviors were due to a child feeling overwhelmed or
underwhelmed by the rigor of the material, if they just had a ton of energy, or
if they had had a rough time the night before. My classroom first semester had
many different skill levels, from children who could scarcely subtract to
children who could already combine like terms. Attendance was also a big
struggle. At any given time about 1/3 of my class might be missing, and thus
very bright kids were not learning the material because they were not in the
classroom.
These struggles were a bit overwhelming at first, but after
talking to my administrators, the special education department, and other Teach
For America alums, I was able to work out a system that works for both my
students and for me. To manage behavior, I made my expectations of classroom
behavior very clear in my own mind and to my students. This allowed me to be
consistent when dolling out discipline and allowed them to feel consequences
were just and expected. To deal with the various ability levels, I began having
upper level students work with medium level students and medium level students
help lower level students. Also, everyday I have an extension activity for
students who finish their assignments early and want to do more. To help prevent chronically absent students
from falling too far behind, I used some advice from TFA alums who also work at
my school and created a system that makes it simple for students to find the
work they missed. At first I was bitter about the “extra” work that my
chronically absent students created for me, but I soon realized that the things
my kids face are so much greater and harder than the things I faced in high
school. I now have compassion for them and am impressed by their desire to work
hard and catch up when they return from school. Everyday I have 2-3
students stay until 5:30 to either practice their algebra or calculus, or to
catch up on work they have missed. In fact, just realizing that my students
were excited to show me how much they could do was revolutionary for me. I
realized that if I bring my excitement and passion for math into the classroom,
then my students can’t help but join in the joy with me.
I have one student in particular who stands out to me. He came
into my pre-algebra class first semester as a sweet and innocent freshman. He
worked hard and sought out my praise. He often asked for extra work to do and
even paid attention to what my favorite songs were, and would request them to
be played during quiet work time. One day something changed. William pushed his
desk to the back of the room and refused to work. When I walked back to check
on him, I saw the gang symbols he had drawn all over his desk and notebook.
School procedure is to send a student to the office after signs of gang
affiliation, and so I did. For the rest of the semester after he returned to
the classroom, William disrupted class by talking across the room to another
game member and by laughing loudly with him at secret signs they made to each
other. He also refused to do his work in class. He kept his grade up and passed
with an A by coming in after school to do work, but it was still devastating to
see a bright young man start down such a negative path.
This semester I have William again for Algebra 1 instead of pre-algebra,
and I knew I would have to do something different. William lives with his aunt,
and she and I now talk every week. She is very invested in William’s academic
success, and is heart broken and furious about the gang situation. Now that I
am in close contact with his auntie, William is once again motivated to do well
in school. Just yesterday I overheard him bragging to other students because I
had scolded him for getting a B in my class. He told them, “She got mad at me
for getting a b because she thinks I can do better.”
Working on the reservation with my 98% native student population
has been one of the biggest blessings in my life, and I know that it is making
a difference in my students lives as well. A mother of one of my students cried
during parent teacher conferences when she told me that her son came home and
said to her, “Mom, I think I can do this.”
