USD President's Report 1999

Mexican Americans believed in the same virtues as did their student peers from other groups. In fact , in some subjects , the Latinos had a more positive attitude about life in the United States than did their white contemporaries. And what may b e true for Latinos, may be true for other peoples of color as well. Shared attributes , not differences , may be the most common image we see in the mirror. But who or what will we choose to see? The companion with whom we have much in common , or the stranger who looks different? The questions linger and answers await.

shapes and co lors there emerge some common traits. During the Gold Rush , our predecessors obsessed over extraneous details : skin color , the shape of the eye , the hair's texture , perhaps an accent or a word ' s pronunciation would determine whether one received hate or affection. But in the present , so to speak, difference would only be skin deep. In the United States , Americans of all types value hard work, integrity , and self-reliance. A sociological study conducted two years ago in San Diego schools noted that Mexican immigrants and

N G T H E PAST

NEW WAY 0 F TE AC H

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Aim.mee Rodriguez left her job as a history instructor, returned to the classroom as a student and is searching for a new way to teach the past. The 28-year-old USD graduate student had been working as an elementary and middle school teacher in impoverished areas in and around Los Angeles, but says she was becoming increasingly disappointed and disillusioned with the state of public schooling in California. "The things I was seeing, the way things were , it was scary," says Rodriguez of the low academic standards and bureaucratic stagnation. "I didn' t feel like I was teaching, I felt like I was just keeping watch. I began to think that there 's got to be a better way." The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Rodriguez is pursuing a master's degree in history in hopes of figuring out what that way will be. She's interested in making documentary films , working in a museum or, in some other way, teaching public history. "There are other ways to teach history besides sitting in a classroom, " sh e says . "As a teacher , I was alarmed at what these kids did not know. I was alarmed at what I didn' t know before I started studying history." Rodriguez wasn' t always a history buff. She was born and raised in C hicago to parents who emigrated to the United _States in 1969 . H er parents moved to the Los Angeles Basin area when she was 6 . After graduating from th e University of Redl ands in 1993, sh e taught English in Costa Rica and worked briefly in a law firm . She was hired at an elementary school in Rialto , Calif ., and then at a middle school in San Bernardino. At both scho o ls, Ro driguez ran into problems deali ng with adm inistrators and parents . School officials wanted her to lower h er grading standards in an effort to produce more passing grades, and parents were unwilling to work with their children on their homework.

"It was difficult ," she says . "It's not what I thought teaching would be. To make a successful student, I believe you have to have a triangle of student-teacher- parent. All three have to be working together. " Rodriguez decided her return to school might lead to so lutions to a problem she 's convinced can be fixed. "I don't want to change the way history is taught ," she says, "but the way it is learned. "

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