In 1980, I was stationed in Port au Prince as a U.S. Marine. Haiti was a crushingly beautiful and profoundly sad place long before the recent quake. Even as unschooled Marines, we realized, after basketball games with shoeless orphans in the poorest sections of Cite Simone, that there was something dead wrong about the social inequities made manifest in that island community. I knew next to nothing of politics or Haitian history, but it was there that I first began to wonder about social justice. It was as a Marine Sergeant that I learned that if you want to get any traction in teaching, you’ve got to get the learning environment right. You’ve got to put culture before content, and recognize that to be educated is to be able to tell the story.
Today I teach economics and government at Camino Nuevo Charter Academy in the Rampart section of Los Angeles, where students and teachers alike bear witness to gang activity, acute poverty and urban brutality of the first order. Yet, within our gates, a school culture of respect and reciprocity has flourished. Our mission is to prepare College Ready, College Bound, Agents of Social Change. Our graduation and college acceptance rates are exceptional, because we – both teachers and administrators alike – attempt to live this mission. More important than those results are the fact that we are helping to raise community citizens who know what compassion is.
Though Camino students suffer from a scarcity of resources writ large, the staff and students have together formed a culture that has been aptly described by a recent visitor as “an island of love.” For me, the key contributions I try to make at Camino concern character education, and it was through the USC Shoah Foundation, as I studied to be a Master Teacher, that I truly felt I found my voice as an educator – though the use of Holocaust testimony, found in their visual history archive. I am thrilled beyond measure to participate with The Memorial Library, to further explore what teaching means to us in our heart of hearts.
Looking so forward!
Peter Cook