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Cultural exchange

Published 12/13/2008 in Features

By SHAJIA AHMAD

sahmad@gctelegram.com

Neeta Marwaha wore a sari to class in recognition of Karwa Chauth, a traditional Hindu celebration of married women that is observed in some parts of India.

Her math students were curious about her exotic clothes and were alarmed by the sindoor -- a red powder -- that she sprinkled along the part in her hair.

"Everyone kept asking me, 'Oh no, Ms. Neeta, what is that? Is that blood on your head?'" she said and laughed.

Marwaha is one of at least 10 teachers who have arrived in Garden City's classrooms from other corners of the world. Several of the teachers agreed that both challenges and opportunities crop up for them and their students in the educational setting.

The need for more math and science teachers in America's public schools long has been a goal of educators. GCHS Principal James Mireles, in his quest to fill teaching positions in the school's math and science departments, has crossed geopolitical borders, including a trip to the Philippines last year. USD 457 also works with the U.S. State Department to recruit teachers from other countries in exchange programs.

It's hard to find American math and science teachers who want to come out to this area, Mireles said. The lack of a big-city life and sterling natural scenery are two of the downsides to attracting willing and energetic educators. However, many of these teachers prove otherwise.

Classroom connections

Sergio Fagundez can communicate with many of his math students in a second language: Spanish. Though their cultures are separated by continents -- he is from Spain and many of his students are of Mexican-American heritage -- they share an interest in at least one thing: fútbol.

"They've very curious; they're always asking me, 'Hey, which team do you like?' and 'What do you think about this player?'" Fagundez said. Before one of his summer trips home to Badajoz, a city in southwest Spain near the Portugal border, his students asked him to bring back soccer memorabilia from their favorite soccer teams, Real Madrid Club de Fútbol and Fútbol Club Barcelona.

Most of the memorabilia sold here is fake, they said, and so the Spanish teacher brought back a few team shirts -- prizes for the best math scores -- for his students.

Fagundez has tutored students and taught in the classroom for many years after his graduation from the Universidad de Extremadura in Spain. Despite his heritage, he is hardly the most exotic personality in his American classroom, he said. He has students of diverse backgrounds, including a Laotian student, a few Burmese and Somalian students and, of course, his Hispanic and Latino students.

One of his students' biggest misconceptions is that Spain is like Mexico because of the shared native tongue, but they couldn't be more wrong, Fagundez said.

When the 31-year-old first moved to Garden City, he was looking for pedestrians in the streets and sidewalks. The streets in Madrid and Badajoz are crowded with foot traffic, and almost everyone uses public transportation to get around in Spanish cities and towns. But in Kansas, Fagundez learned that using public transportation means a person is not able to afford to drive.

The math teacher began adjusting to the new way of life: He began driving to and from work, began teaching in one classroom instead of traveling from room to room as he did in Spain, began to understand how important it is to avoid the invasion of his students' and colleagues' personal space and began saying "hello" to strangers on the sidewalk.

"In the streets of Spain, if you said 'hello' to everyone, you'd never get anywhere," Fagundez joked.

Mistaken identity

The science students in Mark Shera Cruz' physics class were certain he was Mexican or Latin American. If Cruz was a foreign teacher coming from far away, he was sure to know Spanish, right?

"Only muy poquito," Cruz said with a show of his thumb and forefinger and a laugh.

The native language of the dark-haired Filipino teacher who arrived only a little more than a month ago is Tagalog, widely spoken among 60 million Filipinos.

The Philippines' mega diversity among its 7,000 islands of people in the western Pacific Ocean is attributed in part to its long rule by colonial powers, including Spain beginning in the 16th century before it became an American territory following the Spanish-American War.

The science teacher had some visa trouble in Manila -- which explains his mid-semester arrival -- but the experience along the way has been full of new and positive surprises. Teaching in the Philippines is as much a mission as it is a profession, Cruz said. He loves to teach science because he finds experiments and research unexpected and thrilling, and he tries to pass on that zeal to his students in his Kansas classroom.

But things are different here. Science and physics should be the topic of conversation during class, but often students try to change the subject.

"'Do you know Pacquiao?' They ask me, 'Do you live near him?" Cruz said, laughing, and referring to Manny Pacquiao, an international boxing celebrity who is also Filipino.

The classrooms here, Cruz is learning, are much more student-centered and have many more resources than the public classrooms of 60 to 80 students he left behind in the Philippines.

"Sometimes we'd have to improvise the experiments; we didn't have all the gadgets and tools needed," Cruz said. "Sometimes, I even purchased the equipment with my own money."

Cruz said he missed the climate back home, the wet and dry seasons, but is excited for the white Christmas winter in Kansas -- this is the first time he'd ever seen snow.

The 27-year-old teacher would spend his first Christmas alone if it weren't for the other Filipinos teachers and professionals he's met in the area.

"I miss my mother, and I do sometimes miss my students in the Philippines, too, because they were close to me like family; they were like my children," Cruz said.

If the exchange teacher is re-hired next year, he said he won't be returning to see his family until the summer of 2010, a long time to wait.

But in the meantime, he's working on the challenges immediately ahead of him.

"Sometimes, I'm thinking in Tagalog, so I'll say 'OK, take out your libros' -- and then my kids will, 'Hey, Mr. Cruz, are you Spanish?'" Cruz said, laughing. "Libro" also means book in Spanish.

The real lessons

All three teachers agreed that some of the most challenging adjustments in the classroom have not been the physical changes such as classroom size, materials and teaching in a second language, but the mental ones, including the expectations from both sides of the classroom.

"Here, students expect to get an 'A' or 'B' for showing up to class," Fagundez said. "In Spain, it was extremely difficult to get an 'A' or 'B.'"

Marwaha, who taught in New Delhi's schools for many years before beginning her fourth year as a Kansas teacher, agreed. The fact that some of her students need to work to support themselves, their families and in some cases, their own infant children, interferes with their education. That said, the style of teaching and attention to students is geared much more toward student success than in the Indian education system, Marwaha said.

"Here, the students are given time to work on their assignment in class and meet with teachers," she said, adding that the peer-type relationships between her students are important to educational success. "In Delhi schools, students never approach their teachers, and some might even be afraid to."

Marwaha family includes her husband and two teenage girls who still live overseas. She tries to visit her family during vacations. She brings back photos to show her students, who always are asking questions.

"They ask me, 'what festivals do you celebrate?' and 'What is Diwali?' and 'Do you have malls and McDonald's over there?'" she said, adding one of her students' stereotypes is that extreme poverty reaches all parts of India. "I tell them, whatever you have in New York, you have in Delhi, too."

All the teachers agreed no matter their previous experiences and preparation, they had and still have a lot to learn from their students.

"At first, everything is a shock," Fagundez said. "The real lesson comes with your students in the classroom."

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