Fronteras.org

The other day I came across the movie Happiness. That movie, as anyone who has seen it knows, is meant for an entirely different blog. I rented it initially because the cast included Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and I had just finished another round of watching The Big Lebowski a couple times in a row over the course of two days.

Anyway…While I did expect to be shocked by the content, I was not expecting to see an immigration issue play a prominent role in the film. Without giving too much away, one of the key characters in the film goes to work teaching immigrant naturalization classes. Each morning she walks through a circle of strikers, which is composed of teachers demanding benefits. She busts through the picket line every morning, and answers calls of ’scab’ with “I’m not a scab, I’m a strike breaker!”

Inside, the character faces a tough class who wants its old (and currently striking) teacher, Marcia, back in the front of the room. She ends up quitting the center after a taxicab-driving Russian immigrant named Vald steals her guitar and stereo after cheating on his wife. When she tells Vlad that she will not be teaching him, or seeing him anymore, he asks her why. Her response: “I’m starting to feel more sympathy for the strikers.”

Happiness in itself is a ridiculous movie, full of content that is beyond controversial. But that scene raised my interest in another way. It made me wonder if adult education teachers, as well as those that teach immigrants receive any health benefits. In my subconscious I always assumed the answer to be no, but it was not a subject I ever really thought about.

After college I taught elementary school for two years, and recieved excellent benefits. Why then would I just assume that teachers at schools meant for recent immigrants would not have any? Even though I don’t like to admit it, and I’m not sure that many people do, I didn’t look at adult education, or naturalization/English Language classes as equivalent to elementary, high school, or college, and erroneously did not view those teachers in the same light as I viewed the ‘traditional teacher.’ And I believe that is part of the problem, and part of the reason why there is not much attention given to such classes, and in consequence not much money or resources.

One reason for this is that immigrants and those in adult education courses are a very small portion of the population in relation to all the people in America who go to elementary or high school. Since fewer people are using the service, it doesn’t get as many resources. But just as K-12 teachers constantly fight for more resources, more benefits, and more respect, politicians and non-profits insist that they need better educated and more qualified people in the classroom. The way to attract higher qualified people to be teachers rather than financial analysts, ad executives, lawyers, and musicians is to change the way that “teacher” is defined. Sociologists call it “social rewards”, and right now teaching does not offer very many, and unfairly, “adult education teacher/naturalization teacher” seem to carry even less.

I am not familiar enough with naturalization classes, procedures and regulations to make specific judgments, or say that what was presented in Happiness is the norm, but I can speak on the importance of focusing on improving and standardizing classes that teach English and American society to recent immigrants. So regardless of the validity of the scene depicted in Happiness, in an ideal society, such protests would not be necessary.