Open Minds

This tiny "swimmer" is Sarah, the author of our final entry on chapters 1 and 2. Happy reading!


It is hard to describe the feelings I got when I started reading this book; it was unreal. Reading the first two chapters had me sucked in and opened my eyes to how people really feel about their cultural identity. Knowing the potentially sensitive nature of the material, I took a couple of moments to mentally prepare myself before opening the book. Surprisingly, nothing in the first two chapters felt offensive and there certainly wasn’t anything with which I really disagreed.

At the beginning of chapter one, Rayna and Suzanne's daughters are playing in the front yard while their parents talk. I started to really think about when I was a child and how my friends’ backgrounds did not matter; as long as they were nice, I wanted to play with them. Not until adults started putting ideas in my head about different races, did I really care. I feel like that was the same for Rayna who was raised to love all and not just the people of the Muslim community. Learning this at a young age helped her to stay open minded as an adult. “The fact that my grandfather treated Jews, Christians, and Muslims equally was admirable but not miraculous. My parents talk often of time in Palestine when people of the three faiths coexisted peacefully,” (p. 19). This same idea of celebrating all cultures needs to be addressed in our classrooms, especially if you are planning to teach in a very diverse community such as Fresno or the Bay Area where I am from. I remember Dr. Reid told us one of the reasons she moved to Fresno was because it’s very diverse. While I agree that it’s very diverse, I also believe that the Bay Area is even more diverse and is probably even more similar to Priscilla’s environment in New York. “Look what people can do here! They can do anything they want! They can be anyone they want to be. They can worship anywhere they want, whenever they want,” (p. 8). No matter where you live, even if it is some state in the middle of the United States, someday it will be populated with different cultures that you would never think of being there.

When the three women decide to meet at Rayna’s apartment they are all a little skeptical. A person’s home reveals a lot about them and it is their one special place where they can feel safe and are free of judgments from others. It takes a lot of trust to allow someone of a different faith and cultural background to come in to your home to talk about their belief system. Priscilla said, “The space felt both familiar and exotic to me at the same time” (p. 9). I feel that when people open up their homes, it can often bring outsiders to understand that they have many things in common with the other person. When people realize they have things in common they are no longer viewed as such strangers and they feel a sense of openness with one another. I feel like this concept is also true for religion. We often have this picture of what we think of someone’s religion, but it’s not until another person pulls out a scripture of common subject that they really gain respect for one another.

What we know from child development is that when a child comes into a classroom for the very first time they feel as if the classroom is this exotic place with big huge fixtures and strange creatures that kind of look like them. In order for them to feel safe in this exotic place, we as teachers need to help them feel welcome by bringing their cultural beliefs into the classroom. One good example of this is how children whose parents are from the Middle East often handfeed their children until the age of five. This handfed food is often curry-based and very different from the Americanized preschool foods. It would be appropriate in this situation to allow them to bring food from their culture into the classroom to mix in with the school lunch to help them not only transition, but to also feel more comfortable. Also, most of us who grew up in the U.S. were handfed until we were one-year-olds. After that, you better learn to feed yourself; otherwise you are going to be hungry until the next meal is served.

There is so much more that I could address about the first two chapters of this book, but it would be best to wrap it up with what I feel has inspired me and what I hope to get out of the remaining chapters. Most importantly, I hope to gain a better understanding of what it means to be open-minded about all cultures, and I hope by the end of this book I will be able to have all my questions answered about some of the things people do within their culture that I find a little rude or out of place. Understanding the way each family chooses to live will help me and the children in my classroom feel welcomed, but it will also help them improve rapidly in their years of education because they will feel a sense of belonging. Rayna ends the chapter with, “I was an American protected by law and awarded inalienable rights. Then came the attacks of 9/11, and I felt vulnerable and insecure again” (p. 24). I think that, in a way, 9/11 has changed us to have open hearts and open minds to those around us because, after all, we are human beings and we share this land that is under our feet.