Who's to blame?

I still remember the first day of school in third year of primary school for a girl who had just moved to Australia from China. Any student who was of the same race or culture, was immediately given the task of befriending her or teaching her the rules. Other than the obvious reason that no non-chinese person could communicate with her. Everyone was fascinated by her; because we had all grown up together from kindergarten everyone knew each other, but here was someone completely different. From the way she talked, from the way she walked, everything was just so interesting. Like a brand new toy, brought home by mum, enthusiastic to know everything about it. We were so eager we played jump rope – as a class. During recess. Mind you, this never happened before, ever. It was an unspoken rule that everyone had their own friends and what they did during breaks. But that recess, it was the first and last time during primary school, that a class of different races, beliefs and cultures coming together to jump to the beat of the skipping rope hitting the ground.
The sense of belonging that the class had and I felt lasted for a week. Sadly, like all toys, eventually they get discarded or worse, get physically damaged be it from emotional or physical abuse, sometimes maybe because they don’t understand how to use the toy or they don’t want to play with it anymore. The next week, she became the ‘new girl who couldn’t understand English.’ I tried my best to continue talking and teaching but eventually, I became selfish and I took the easy way. She was too foreign and was too hard to communicate with. I left her all by herself, because she thought things differently, talked differently and acted differently – the very things that had made us all connect as a class.
My point is a person can be treated as a toy because of the difference in the colour of skin or the way one talks because of an accent. Even from the age of seven, a young girl was left to tend on her own, because no one understood her. But it was more to do with the fact that no one bothered to understand her. I realise now that the students in the class acted the way they did because she was treated as different from a very start, first and foremost by the teacher. The teacher was instrumental in having the whole class teach her as a whole and thus, we followed. But as time went by, she began to ignore the problems of having a student with a non-english-speaking background and consequently, no longer thought it necessary to go at a slower pace, or arguably just didn’t want to. The students followed the ways of the teachers. Like the disciples loyally follow Jesus. The role of the teacher in educating, even educating about life, is important as it really builds on the character and values of a student. The students in my year three class probably experienced another situation as they grew up but the result will likely be the same. Normally how you deal with similar and earlier situations, is how you deal with the situations later on. The teacher found it frustrating to teach to the convenience of one student, who’s not to say that this will happen again every time because of language barriers or culture differences influencing one’s learning? Educators need to understand that they educate students, not just through knowledge but via their actions too.