Advice for a new teacher

DEAR DR. FOURNIER: I recently graduated and have my first teaching position at a school for socioeconomically and racially diverse gifted children.

It is fourth grade, one I loved when I did my student teaching. I have followed your column and it has helped me rethink some of my positions about children and teaching. What advice would you give to help me become someone who can make differences in the lives of my students?

ASSESSMENT: You are entering the most important profession of this nation. While other professions are important, you have just entered the profession that will develop the minds of the people who will determine and be responsible for the future global position of the United States. You have entered the profession that grows or destroys the mind, body and spirit of this nation.

Now that we have instant communication capability, there are nations, cities, towns, neighborhoods and streets we had never heard of that now fill our news. The Internet is quickly becoming the global newscaster and intelligence agency of the world.

This instant communication has allowed "sleeping nations" to become "emerging nations." Now, for the first time in the history of the United States, our children will become adults who will work at eye level with "emerged" nations no longer willing to be treated as beneath any other.

WHAT TO DO: Look at your classroom as a microcosm of the global community and each child as an emerging nation. Read Ashley Montagu's "Statement on Race" and you will see that "race" is the wrong word to use.

The correct word is "ethnicity."

When people are introduced at parties, conversations routinely go like this:

"Are you Italian?"

"Yes, I was born and grew up there but my father was from Scotland and my paternal grandparents were Scottish and English. On my mother's side, my grandparents were from South Africa and Greece. And you?"

"My parents lived in England, but were born in Spain and their parents came from the Netherlands and Greece."

People don't ask in a social setting, "What is your race?" Why? Because it's an insult. Socially, we never ask a person's race, yet, politically, we never ask for ethnicity! Politicians categorize us by race so they can stratify us socioeconomically. It's a way for one "race" to maintain power over another.

Yet we are not of different races -- we are of different ethnicities, so teach your students to use only the word "ethnicity" because the only race that exists is the human race.

If you do this, by the end of the school year you will be able to say you've added to the formation of the nation's future leaders. How? You've rid them of stereotypes and labels.

Now for "gifted":

Teach them that each child, no matter what class he or she is assigned to, is an individual and is gifted in his or her own way. By teaching this, you will have unburdened your students of intellectual elitism and arrogance because someone used his or her own personal standard to label this class as more gifted than others.

My advice is to help every child recognize and honor one another's ethnicity as the source of strength from the past to lead in the future and to assure every child you teach that he or she is gifted in a way that forever will help make the world a better place.

(Write Dr. Yvonne Fournier, Fournier Learning Strategies Inc., 5900 Poplar, Memphis, Tenn. 38119. E-mail her at drfournier(at)hfhw.net)