Personal Narrative: Disconnection Between Education And The Language Of My Culture

Growing up in a neighborhood where you were automatically labeled a “screw-up” or a criminal has affected my peers and I in negative way. Many generations before mine have been discouraged to further their education, simply because of the marginalization of our ethnicity and the neighborhood where we have grown up. There is a disconnection between the language of my education and the language of my culture simply because in the schools my peers and I attend, we are not pushed enough to realize our full potential. Meanwhile at home, [most being hispanic] we are told that furthering our education is the most valuable thing we do have in life. In our hispanic families, we have a lot of support to follow our dreams and do whatever we need to in order to be successful, and although that is very helpful for many, it can only do so much. If we were pushed like this by the rest of the world and not treated as though we do not deserve to be successful, we would push to do our very best all the time.
School is a place where I’m supposed to learn about how to deal with life outside of school, but in reality a lot of what I learn is no use to me in real life. I’ll never have to graph a polynomial function outside of algebra class, and I’ll never have to explain to someone how to figure out the count of valence electrons in Oxygen. Outside of school, however, I do learn about things useful to me. Like how to communicate with others, or how I can survive on my own without having to be dependent on someone else. School has ceased to be about learning, now it’s all about memorizing material for a test and