Understanding Diversity
James Hankins reflects on NC State as a diverse institution and explains how his experiences interacting with a variety of people/personalities in college have helped him in his current position as a high school teacher.
Interview on 2011-07-14 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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I wouldn't be the person that I am, I wouldn't be as passionate about education,
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I wouldn't be as passionate as I am about service and public service
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if it had not been for my experiences at State,
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my positive and my negative experiences.
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I am thankful for my negative experiences at State
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because they have informed me as to who I am and how I react to different situations.
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They have informed me about how people can be. I'm not saying I was naive when I came in and thought everybody was good, but I
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really did have a perception that everybody was working for the greater good-quote, unquote-
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and I learned that not everybody's working for the greater good unless the greater good is the greater good for themselves,
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so I learned the hard lessons that way.
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I also learned that you can build lifelong friendships, you can build things that you call brotherhood,
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you can build connections with people that you might never have met before,
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and State is the only school in the system,
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having visited other schools and been around through the Association of Student Governments,
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having been around just traveling in that sense,
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NC State is the only school in the system, in my experience,
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where you really get a diverse group of people together
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and have them interact with each other without having a ton of conflict.
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There's a lot of underlying issues at State when it comes to
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race and all different types of issues that need to be addressed by the administration, they need to be addressed by the school,
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but for the most part I've met people from various different backgrounds
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that I never would have thought that I could call a friend of mine,
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being from Wilmington.
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Now I call them friends, and I'm able to interact with those types of people now on a daily basis at school.
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Teaching is all about the people that come in your classroom.
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You have students that come in from various different backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses.
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They might have a different opinion on something from somebody else that might be radically different.
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Some of them might be really religious, some of them not. All types of things come into your classroom
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and as a teacher you have to know how to be able to deal with each one of those students as individuals.
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You can't treat them-. One of my colleagues one time said something to me that was terrible.
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She said that you have to kind of look at students as numbers, as kind of like meat puppets,
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and I thought about that and I said, no, that's not the case.
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I can come up here and put the information on the board and if they get it they get it and if they don't they don't,
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and I can still have my job and come home every day and relax and not worry about anything,
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but if I cannot connect with those students or try to connect with those students, each and every one of them individually,
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then I've failed as a teacher. That's what you're supposed to do.
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The only school in this system that can prepare you for that on
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a level in which you really get diversity is NC State.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.