ABSTRACT
It was my first year of teaching. I was a 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade teacher of reading, Spanish, and French in Ocean-Hill/Brownsville in Brooklyn, a community of African Americans and Puerto Ricans that had seen more than its fair share of educational neglect. I was the first Puerto Rican teacher in the school in anyone’s memory. I was also the “NE” teacher, so named because I taught the “NE” (nonEnglish) students. Although I was perfectly fluent in English (and in Spanish), and I had a newly minted master’s degree in literature, I was labeled right along with my students, and people didn’t expect much from either of us. I often think of the beginning of my teaching career because it reminds me of the damaging effect of labels on all people, children or adults. But children are not “NE,” or “ELLs,” or “SPED,” or “at risk,” or “the bilinguals,” or “AFDC,” or “culturally deprived,” or any other label that may be in vogue at the moment. They are children, and they each embody both wonderful individuality and the cultural imprint of their families and communities. They come to us with language, ideas, experiences, and other resources that can be used in the service of their education. Being multicultural means accepting and welcoming these differences-linguistic, cultural, racial, experiential, and others-and leaving the labels behind.
