15 May 2007 Tuesday
As usual, we had a lecture in the morning. It was on “Re-inventing Silicon Valley”. Insightful lecture on the icons (HP & Google!), the historical context, the features of SV and the implications and future of SV…
Then it was field research time for us in the afternoon! Many of them went to the library or stayed around in Stanford to do their research while Aileen, Shamiah and I ventured into East Palo Alto (EPA) again. We visited the Cesar Chavez Academy which is an elementary school predominantly Hispanic-dominated.
A group of students playing games during free time before school ends at 3pm.
They have their own mini track and field in their school!
A glimpse of one of their classrooms...
Saw this in one of the classrooms... Pretty insprising=)
We interviewed a relief teacher, a regular teacher and a couple of students. This tonga student whom we met left a deep impression in me.
That's him beside me... His name is Alofangia. Nice young chap=)
He’s in 8th grade and the President of some student group. He was a problem child and was recently transferred to this school because his previous school requested for the transfer. But since his transfer, he met this really great teacher who changed his life and now he’s doing so well. He has a GPA of 3.0. Pretty good for a minority student in the States=) His greatest aspiration is to be a policeman so that he can give something back to his community in EPA. He believes that the media has often reported the stabbings and shootings in EPA but neglected the social problems the community has to deal with. He wants to go to college too, maybe Stanford=) We were so inspired by his community spirit and idealism. Hopefully, he can achieve his goals in the years to come…
We also interviewed this white American boy. He’s one of the few Caucasians in the predominantly-minority school (sounds oxymoronic… the minorities are the majority in this school). Surprisingly, he said he gets along very well with the other ethnicities and he did not feel alienated just because he is surrounded by the minority ethnicities… I wonder why...
The school ended at 3 and we did not have time to make it in time to another school in the vicinity so we decided to make a trip to the Police Station to get some statistics of the EPA community.
See, it states so la!
However, it wasn’t exactly THE Police Station per se. It was in fact, the records department, which explains why it closes at 4.30pm that day. Hiya, then say “Police Records Department” la… waste our time only…
As they have just knocked off, we decided to knock on the door anyway. Fortunately, someone opened the door and let us in. While we did not get any statistics, we heard from the people in the records department that there had been a shooting yesterday and a stabbing incident a couple of days back. And they kept warning us how dangerous it is to hang out in EPA. Hence, one of the ladies (I guess she’s a latino) who is currently training to be a policewomen offered to give us a ride to downtown Palo Alto=) Sweet.
As downtown Palo Alto, we got free scopes of Haggen Daas ice cream because a new flavor was introduced today and they were giving free scopes of ice cream. I tried the Sticky Toffee Pudding or something like that. Very sweet but good la. So Singaporean to go for free stuff... But that’s definitely not something that I am proud of being a Singaporean…
After savoring the yummy ice cream, Aileen and I headed back to Stanford. We had our dinner at the food fair for International Week.
Setting up in the morning...
There’s Turkish food, Mexican food, Indian food, Chinese food, American food (whatever that means), and Italian food. The silican beef skewers from the Italian store was damn good la. Yummy! There was only a rock band playing and you’ll see Stanford students dancing to the music. Really cool. Wish we had that in NUS=(
After which, we crashed a lecture on bilingual education in the school of education. The prof was pretty nice and made us introduce ourselves to the whole class of about 15-20 students. Surprisingly, none of them knows where Singapore is. One even said we are at the east to China (that’s Japan la)=( During lesson, we broke up into a few groups to participate in jigsaw learning. Each group talked about a specific question and they will re-group themselves with people from other groups and teach the rest on their specific topic. Anyway, that’s not the point. The last time we interacted with the Stanford students who hosted us, I felt extremely inferior because they are all so smart, so well-learned about almost everything… but after interacting with students from this education class, Aileen and I felt that the comments that these Stanford students made were not exceptionally intelligent. I think they are comparable to NUS students except that they are more vocal and willing to speak up without fear of embarrassing themselves… Some to learn from them…
When class ended, the prof, an educational psychologist, was damn nice la. He drove us back to our doorstep even though he lived nearer to campus than we do. Cool!
