my name is latu and i am a high school drop out

when i was 11 years old, i was in the 6th grade. my teacher was named mrs. day. she was a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, first year teacher. looking back now, i am sure she was convinced she would conquer the world, one impressionable child at a time. she started out the school year by letting us know she had driven by our houses the week before. there was no explanation or justification. she just let that loom in the air. i knew for a fact my house was the most ghetto in the class. i was the only one in my class from the poor area in our school boundary. the other kids were from richer neighborhoods slash were rich. :) at least to a poor 11 year old!

mrs. day paid me lots of attention, right from the beginning of the year. the unfortunate thing is that the last thing i wanted as an 11 year old was attention from my teacher. at the time, i felt like she hated me and picked on me. if there was a teacher's pet (which there most definitely was) i was the opposite. while other children had the opportunity to turn in assignments late, the teacher was very strict about the late assignment policy with me. i spent countless reward days or holidays working by myself in another classroom, unable to participate in whatever the class was doing. i was not disrespectful; i was still much too young to understand that i could do what i wanted at school, even if the "rules" forbade it.

on a field trip, the class waited in line to get our sack lunches out of the box. when my turn came in the line, i grabbed my lunch, rather than wait for her to hand it to me. she thought that was proof that i cut the line, and made me go to the back; ignoring my pleas that it was really my turn. instead, i walked off and cried by myself. i didn't eat lunch that day. i was so embarrassed and felt so hopeless because she hadn't even listened to me. i wrote book reports about books i had read, and was told the books were too childish for a 6th grader (at least one of them was a book i read with my friend in the class. it wasn't too childish for her) i was often not allowed to go to computers, as i was behind on my work. i wasn't allowed to check out reading books for the same reason (i needed to focus more on my school work)

one chilly day, i forgot an assignment at home. terrified that i would not be able to turn it in late, i decided to run home and grab the assignment. i was 20 minutes late, and the teacher took me outside to talk about my "attendance problem". mind you, i was a naive 11 year old CHILD. i was trying, and it did not seem like she saw it at all. i had no idea that you could stand up for yourself to adults, that everything they said was not gospel truth. i didn't know that i could tell my mom what all was going on, how i felt about this teacher, how much i hated school. i really just thought that if your teacher hated you, you were so outta luck.

in my eyes, that teacher was evil. i came to hate her. during christmas break, i envisioned creative ways i could have a class change. i plotted ways to get her to like me, but in the end i basically gave up. i endured the last half of the year, but i hated every moment of it. school stopped being fun and became monotonous and a punishment. recess was my only solace, and i became depressed. for the first time in my life, i was failing at something. i hated the feeling and i hated the teacher.

that feeling moved on with me from 6th to 7th grade. 7th grade was a ridiculously hard grade for me. but, rather than dutifully attend, i began to just sleep through my morning classes. in one term (with about 45 days) i had 27 absences and 16 tardies in my first period class. it became painfully obvious that i had not learned anything in math or science from 6th grade. this sounds really dramatic, but i truly feel that 6th grade year set the stage for the rest of my academic failure. i struggled all through 7th and 8th grade. 9th grade was better, but only because i had one amazing teacher. and high school. let's not get into high school or the reasons i dropped out with three packets to complete and in the last week of school my senior year.

the point is that until my 6th grade year, school was fun. it was a place that i excelled at, a place i felt safe. after my 6th grade year, my perspective changed and school became a punishment. i did not see the point in trying anymore. i know that a lot of people feel basically the same way, but a lot of people did not have the experience i had with mrs. day. no matter the argument, 6th grade changed my life.

a few years ago, my mom filled in some blanks for me in the mrs. day story. i guess during a parent-teacher conference (no, not the ones where you bring your parents into the classroom and show off your desk and artwork. the kind where you stay outside the classroom and your mom meets with the teacher by herself) mrs. day let my mom know that she felt i was not living up to my potential. thus, she (as a first year teacher with no children) decided she would "push latu" so that i could meet my potential. i don't know what exactly she was pushing me towards, but you can be sure that, as a high school dropout and (now) statistic, i did not meet her potential. i have thought for a long time that i didn't hate her, but i would mos def tell anyone who asked what a bad teacher she was. i guess no one's asked yet. i am just telling anyways.

knowing this has put so many things into perspective. mrs. day hadn't hated me. i was just her project. i am sure she saw me as the perfect storm; minority, poor, a girl. she was going to change my life. she was a brand-spanking new teacher, and she already had found the perfect project child. while i am sure her intentions were good, she truly did not understand me or anything about basic child psychology. she did not understand the damage you can do a child by making them a failure. by planting the seeds of hopelessness and despair in a child. i am one of the 10.3% of american high school students that dropped out in 2004. quite the statistic to be proud of.

i never saw mrs. day after 6th grade. i believe she moved out of state because her husband had finished school. i strongly feel like if mrs. day wanted children she could "push" toward their potential, she should have taught high school. at least those kids know for sure that adults are not perfect.

don't explain your life...

while talking to my sister the other day, she said something i have not been able to get out of my mind.

she pointed out that my dad has never been anything BUT tongan, thus he could not understand what it is like to try and figure out who he is.

a simple statement, but one that really struck me. i tend to think that my life situation is completely original, there is no one out there who understands what it is like to be me. call it left-over teenage angst, call it whatever you like. in one sentence, i realized how similar our childhoods must have been, my sister and i. we both had the same parents, lived basically the same places, but most importantly, we both had to decide who we were. what culture we more identified ourselves with and, most importantly, what that meant for our lives.

i felt a strange bond with my sister right then. beyond the bond of siblings, or best friends. we were suddenly in the fight of our lives, defining who we were and fighting racial struggles together. it was a dramatic moment, but i don't think i could have it any other way.

you see, this is a pretty sensitive subject for me. i spent my childhood knowing that i was tongan. living in hawaii, people always wanted to know exactly what my heritage was. it was a simple answer for me, "i'm tongan." and then they moved on to the hawaiian-portuguese-chinese-scottish-korean-filipino next to me. as i grew up, the answer to the question became more difficult for me. i started adding in the "half" to my response. suddenly, i went from having one culture to only half of a culture.

we moved to utah, and i continued to be half. i didn't feel like i could claim being white or being tongan. both answers felt like a lie to me. so, i avoided the question until high school, when i firmly decided i was not tongan. i was white. my mom was a girl from idaho, and my grandparents had just moved back to my grandpa's farm there. for the first time in my life, i could walk places that my ancestors walked. i could walk through a cemetary in idaho and find graves from my grandma to my grandpa's great grandparents. my grandparents moved into the house my great great grandpa built. there was family history everywhere. my heritage was suddenly accessible to me and i loved it.

i think another reason i decided i was white is that i was tired of people writing off behaviors or opinions of mine to my race. i was not stubborn because i was tongan. i am just a stubborn person. i wanted the world to know my white side so they could see that stubbornness runs in that blood, too. i didn't skip school because i was tongan. i did it because i was a teenager who was bored with the system. i believed racism was wrong not because i felt it as a tongan. but because i felt it as a white child, too white for some of my tongan relatives.

my dad's closest relatives, his sisters, were all half a world away in australia or new zealand. i became disconnected to that part of me, and wanted to prove to the world that i was not who they thought i was. so, i spent a long time refusing to be, or even act, anything but white. as far as i was concerned, i was just another white utah girl from utah. sure, most white people still saw me as the tongan girl, and i am sure some of them judged me by that assumption, or even made judgments on all tongans based on my behaviors. but i did not care. i knew i was white, and nothing they could say would change it.

then, slowly, a change began to happen. i got into contact with some of my first cousins in aussie land after high school. before i knew it, i was on a plane halfway across the world to australia. for the first time in my adult life, i was acting tongan, doing tongan things and around tongan people. for the first time in my life, i was meeting my tongan family. i was among not just relatives, but CLOSE relatives. i started to rethink some things that i had believed so firmly about myself.

i am not really sure when the change completely happened, and i am sure i am not done changing. but, at this moment in my life, i have never been more content with myself.

i know that i am half tongan and half white. i know that to most of the world, this knowledge means a completely different thing than it does for me. but, for me, i'm ok being both. i am ok with the tongans who think i do certain things because i am white. i am ok with the white people who think i do certain things because i am tongan. and i am even ok with all the other halfs out there, who think i do certain things because i am half. i am overwhelmed with grattitude for the people out there who think i do certain things because i am me. who don't need a cause beyond that.

i know who i am, and i don't really need the world's approval for it anymore. maybe more importantly is that i don't want the world's approval anymore.

About Latu

Well, my name is Latu. I am a 23 year old, on-again, off-again college student. My eventual goal is to become a Guardian ad Litem, so technically I am Pre-Law.

That about covers any small-talk questions you get while attending school, (name, age, major, and what you'll do with that major) but I am not finished :)

I work at a juvenile treatment center in the Provo, Utah area, and quite like my work most days. I am pretty bipolar with my personality; sometimes my bleeding heart drives me crazy and sometimes I am just the meanest cuss you've ever met. I try to stay pretty pleasant, but I can make no promises for people who wake me up in the mornings.

Once, I had surgery that they promised to wake me up from immediately after. Well, 4 hours after the surgery is done, I remember the nurse talking to me and just wanting her to shut up. I woke up to find my arms and legs strapped down and the nurse extremely frustrated at having to spend hours waking me up. I don't think she understands how extremely frustrating it was for me that she would not shut up no matter how many times I tried to swing at her!

I hate the color test (red, blue, white, yellow personality types) because none of the answers ever apply perfectly, and I feel like people judge me off inaccurate answers. That being said, I am half red, half blue.

I am quite critical of everyone. Some people get offended and emotional about it. I usually just get over it and brush it off as normal.

I get over things easily. It is a blessing and a curse all in one. Sometimes, I wish I could freeze my anger and thaw it out to use again later, but usually I end up forgetting why I thought any given situation was such a big deal. Good thing for traumatic situations, bad thing for holding grudges :)

Well, I really am not sure what I was supposed to write here, and I hope I am not getting graded on this, but that's about me!