English teacher Stacey McCown learned lessons teaching in underprivileged neighborhoods
For English teacher Stacey McCown, every day teaching at MVHS is taken in perspective from a long career.
She recounts her stories during classtime from a school in Bakersfield, where she spent six years teaching at a college and 12 years teaching at the local high school. The high school separated students into five categories based on their aptitude for learning. McCown taught the Advanced Placement classes as well as what the school called the "fundamental" level. According to McCown, the Advanced Placement students were much like those at MVHS, highly motivated and willing to learn. On the other hand, many of the students of the fundamental program did not have the academic spirit to learn new material and may have had problems that needed different confrontation for them to be successful at school. The variety of the students at the school differed from the variety at MVHS; they came from different economic backgrounds, different cultures and different races. Even between the students of the Advanced Placement classes and the fundamental level had distinct differences not only in personality, but also in the attitude that they brought to class.
Although teaching Advanced Placement students presented its own intellectual challenges, teaching the fundamental-level students posed an entirely different kind of difficulty.
"They are even more demanding because they will not learn unless they see that it will benefit them in some way," McCown said. "[I had] to learn lots of other ways to get through to them and make the learning meaningful for them."
The backgrounds of the students in the fundamental level might have contributed to their different approaches to learning at school. Many fundamental students were children of farmers who had lived in poverty for the majority of their lives. Kids who were only 16 had seen and been through more than adults twice their age. When faced with the task of learning, they saw almost no benefit to education.
"Most of them were from foster homes, and in and out of jail," McCown said. "I even had a kid that was deported during class one day."
Each student, due to the unique and troubling issues each student had to over come, ended up having a different viewpoint on the literature. According to McCown, many fundamental students were able to relate to the materials they were analyzing better than the Advanced Placement students could. It was because they, too, had suffered through their own hardships which helped them identify with a variety of studied topics.
"You learn about life from them, too," McCown said. "You learn that we all have our challenges and I think it just makes me more empathetic."
McCown recalled that the students in the fundamental level were able to show their intellect in different ways, but not necessarily through academic means. Many of the students possessed knowledge and experience that the Advanced Placement students knew nothing of. It wasn"t academic knowledge perhaps, but it definitely made them smarter in different ways. Having a deeper, more personal understanding of the literature they were taught by McCown allowed the students to better absorb her lessons. She tried to impart on them about how literature is not just reading and writing, but a study of life and humanities which, over time, they were able to understand.
Learning experiences from schools with completely different atmospheres and attitudes have taught McCown how to build a close, trusting relationship with all her students in order to improve the learning process. By creating a stable relationship with her students, she is able to fulfill her role as a teacher.
"At [MVHS] you start off with a good experience," McCown said. "But at other schools, you have to work harder in the beginning to get them to the point where they want to learn and where you truly form a partnership."
