Cultural understanding is never something I’ve really worked on improving. It’s just something that has come naturally to me. It might go back to my early schooling and the fact that the neighborhood I grew up in was so diverse. I saw a number of different cultural things on my way to school and in my classes. They were filled with people of all different colors, but I didn’t even notice then, everyone was just a person. Junior high was much the same, but by the time I got to high school I was very much alone.
     Tracking might not be an accepted policy of any district, but weather they accept he fact that they’re doing it or not, it happens. In high school all of my classes were white, pure white. If by chance there happened to be a black student placed into one of them, they usually transferred out within a week. Still I was better of than some of the students I went to school with in the afternoon. They had never even seen a minority at their school; mine was half full of them, even though I didn’t spend any time with them in school on a daily basis.
     After school is when I got my real education. Football as a ninth grader opened my eyes to a lot of things. It wasn’t Remember the Titans, but it was a new language and a new way of thinking. I can’t say that it was something that I hadn’t experienced before, but in beginning an academic separation I began to realize the other separations in my life.
     Throughout high school it was business as usual, classes during the day and cultural education in the afternoons. My white friends began to pick up the speech patterns of the other people who they had an opportunity to be around. I began to pick up speech patterns from them. It wasn’t an education in the sense that I knew I was learning something, but when the opportunity presented itself for that knowledge to be used it was there.
     Coming to college at Western, I imagined that I would be immersed in a more cultural setting. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is true that there are a number of cultural people here, but being in the honors college and living in the honors dorm I found a crowd of predominately white people. My living situation was so Caucasian that when my floor had an African American RA my sophomore year he used to make jokes at his own expense knowing he was the only person of his race in the building.
 
     In all seriousness the first time that I realized I had a gift was when I began working for the Kellogg Community College Upward Bound Program. Being an education major I was excited to find a job where I could apply my talents working toward my future job of becoming a teacher. I would work with students who were going to the high school I graduated from. I would listen to their concerns and help them achieve their goals; prepare them for college.
     The wakeup call came the first day I had on the job. Here was a group of kids that was almost completely African American. They were talking in a dialect that was so thick that I was only coming away with part of what they were saying every time that they talked to me. I strained to understand them better and as time went on I began to remember what I had learned in high school and put it together with what I was learning now.
     Three summers in that job prepared me well for an internship at Kalamazoo Central here in town. I understand most everything all of my students say. I try to take the time to share with some of my colleagues the things that they don’t understand.  I groan as I watch my mentor use their own language with them in good fun. I do though, from my experiences, have an understanding that I think is a very valuable one.
    You can talk about culture and being cultural all you like. It’s nice to give it recognition, but until you’ve lived and participated in it all that cultural talk is just a waste of time. I have put myself into culture and I feel prepared to handle and adapt to any situation I might find myself. In. I look forward to learning more in the future and sharing with others, cultural differences are not something to be marginalized. Cultural differences need to be embraced and understood not just labeled for all to see.