Rodriguez School Quotes

If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.

It was almost as if she was still the bewildred girl of fourteen who wasn't ready to be an adult.

To many persons around him, he appears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.

And it’s not entirely true that I’ve never been in love. I had a pet gerbil in first grade, Spazzy, whom I loved passionately. I will never stop blaming myself for bringing Spazzy to show-and-tell at school, where Edgar Thibaud let open his cage when I wasn’t looking and Spazzy met Jessica Rodriguez’s cat Tiger and, well, the rest is history. Goodwill to Spazzy up in gerbil heaven. Sorry sorry sorry. I stopped eating meat the day of the massacre, as penance for Spazzy. I’ve been a vegetarian since age six, all for the love of a gerbil.

I was working second shift and weekends, never seeing my children, and I felt like I was selling my soul to the devil for health insurance and paid vacations.

So that is why the extremists try to keep girls from going to school? That is the reason we are poisoned and beaten, and our teachers threatened and killed?

Who should we trust to say what teaching is, and how does this play out in schools? How can we even begin to transform education policy or practice unless we all understand what teaching really means?

screamed and jumped out of the

Look, I get it. Clemson is a Southern school, and there is a strong military tradition in the region. I don’t doubt for a second that everyone associated with the football program and the university recognized the potential for a public relations windfall. They really had nothing to lose: give the decorated Army vet a uniform and let him take classes. Everybody wins. I suppose they never expected that I’d become anything other than a practice player and a goodwill ambassador for Clemson football. But I aspired to something more than that.

To Caroline Rodriguez,” Coop toasted, “a living saint, who rescued me from depression and poverty after law school. May I eventually be worthy of her.” Caro blushed prettily.

This chapter examines why the State of Texas considered the social segregation of Mexican Americans an ordinary part of life. It begins by examining two landmark cases in which Texas courts ruled that it was not unconstitutional to segregate Mexican Americans. Independent School District v. Salvatierra (1930) illustrates how district zoning laws were used to segregate Mexican American students. Terrell Wells Swimming Pool v. Rodriguez (1944) explores exclusion laws applied to public accommodations and the state’s application of these laws to Mexican Americans.

Life was always too short. If you miscarry a baby, you wish you could have at least held him. If you rock your daughter to sleep before she passes, you wish you could have seen her first day of school. If you lose your son after graduation, you wish you could have gotten to dance at his wedding. If your daughter dies as a young woman, you wish you could have gotten to meet your grandkids. And on and on and on it goes. They were always too young.

The alternative kids said nothing so I chose Holes, whose author was renowned for his quirky sense of humor. I started to read aloud with gusto. A girl listened for about two minutes then asked if she could read aloud. “Sure,” I said, handing her the book. I watched her struggle to read aloud and helped her pronounce a few words. She read several pages before losing interest and wandering off. In fact, all of the kids had wandered away while we were reading. They were out in the hall and in doorways of other classrooms. Deputy Rodriguez arrived and herded kids back inside my room, and I was embarrassed to have literally lost them. When a majority of kids returned, I closed the door, trapping them, and kept on reading.

By 1973, when the resource inequities between the public schools had become too obvious to deny, the Supreme Court ruled, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, that property-tax allocations yielding inequities in public schools do not violate the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

In 2010, Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez of Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California, sent home five white students who were wearing American-flag clothing on Cinco de Mayo. They said they often wore patriotic clothing, and intended no provocation. When their parents and others protested, about 200 Mexican-American students walked out of class in support of the Hispanic assistant principal, and demanded that the white students be suspended. They said wearing red, white, and blue on Cinco de Mayo was an insult to Hispanics. Some schools have banned the American flag. After Mexican students at Santa Ynez Valley Union High School in Santa Barbara County, California, brought Mexican flags to school, whites replied with American flags. They said they were simply being patriotic, but Principal Norm Clevenger said the American flags suggested “intolerance” and confiscated them. Likewise, at Skyline High School in Denver, Colorado, American flags were banned from campus when Principal Tom Stumpf decided they had been waved “brazenly” at Hispanic students. He banned all other flags, too. The entire Oceanside Unified School District in San Diego County banned flags and flag-motif clothing. The district decided they were too provocative after Hispanics participated in large-scale marches demanding amnesty for illegal immigrants. Officials said flags were being used to taunt other students and stir up trouble. Thirteen-year-old Cody Alicea liked to fly a one-foot American flag from his bicycle to show support for veterans in his family. Officials at Denair Middle School in Denair, California, made him take it off, explaining that the flag could cause “racial tension” with Hispanic students. It is difficult to think of diversity as a strength when Old Glory is treated as gang colors.