As a teacher, I expect my George Mason University summer writing course to meet every day, compress six papers into four weeks, require revisions until students cry “uncle!” then end with a smile and an “Enjoy what’s left of the summer.”
One thing I don’t expect is to learn something.
Yet nothing is more reliable than student unreliability. Just when you think you have the summer all figured out, your students shake up your preconceptions. It happened with a paper I assign each semester: What is it to be an American?
Students often reminisce about barbeques or Nascar races or weekends at the beach. Some recount moving tales of their family’s arrival in the United States. Generally, they rejoice in their freedoms, appreciative of the wealth of opportunities offered by our nation.
Students have never, though, questioned public perception of their status as Americans. Yet this summer, several papers reminded me that the term “American” is fraught with stereotypes — some of them mine.
Marwa is an American. She moved here 15 years ago and speaks perfect English. Yet when she goes shopping, the cashier often looks at her Islamic head covering and asks “So how do you like it here?”
Marwa speaks of the irony of her U.S. citizenship: In the U.S. people assume she is not American. And even people in the country she left longago marvel when they see her American passport.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Marwa wisely comments. Since we have always been a country of immigrants, what is it to “look” American?
Tareq knows all about that. He grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains on 11 acres, fishing and “mud bogging.”
His paper is a hymn to southern country life; the unusual slant, though, is that his Middle Eastern name, Tahboub, has led to countless misapprehensions. Even though he doesn’t look like the “Dukes of Hazzard,” he is a southern boy through and through.
Sandy, born in Morocco when the State Department stationed her father there, returned to the U.S. when she was 10 months old, yet is grilled when people see the birthplace on her passport. “You’re Moroccan?” they say. “Some of the terrorists from 9/11 were Moroccan.” She feels this stigma now whenever she travels.
Caylee, who fled with her family from Cambodia, has done a tour of duty in Iraq. She rejoices that she can “live with a belly full of dreams or a library full of books … I don’t for one second take any of the things I have for granted.” Like Tareq and Marwa, she is an example of the all-American student whose appearance might lead some to make false assumptions.
I needed my students to shake up these assumptions, and remind me what it is to be American, and what it’s not. I had slipped into a complacent, stereotyped notion of the kind of paper I would receive. Being American is, and always has been, beyond flag waving and skin color, country of origin or last name.
Perhaps, most of all, it’s about puncturing stereotypes and accepting that what makes us American might possibly be as surprising a concept as education in the summertime.
Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
