Teachers Get Lesson on Farm Work

Twenty Oxnard high school teachers stepped out of their daily routines last week and onto an eight-acre cabbage patch so they could better understand the lives of farm-working parents.

Although they started the day at 6:30 throwing cabbage into a truck at a fairly quick pace, the teachers realized early on that field work is no picnic. What began as a novelty quickly turned to drudgery.

“Notice how they aren’t laughing anymore,” said Cuba Carera, a Spanish and geography teacher at Hueneme High School, about 90 minutes into the workday Friday.

Although unfamiliar with the exacting field work, many of the high school teachers involved in Oxnard Union High School District’s novel program seemed familiar with the needs of migrant students.

As she watched her colleagues dodge flying cabbages near Teal Road on the Oxnard Plain, English as a second language instructor Lori Rice said of her many migrant students:

“Their family structure is not very conducive to homework. There isn’t really a quiet place to study because oftentimes several families share a house and a lot of them are expected to baby-sit and work.”

Yet none of the teachers pretended to be experts in migrant life, and most seemed eager to learn more.

“If I don’t understand their home life, I don’t understand my students,” said Lisa Porter, a government teacher at Channel Islands High.

As the day progressed, professional field workers turned the tables on the teachers, tutoring them in the subtleties and harsh realities of picking cabbage and hoeing onion fields.

By noon, as the teachers were completing their lessons in strawberry picking, they said they could begin to appreciate the physical costs of stoop labor.

“Just after 10 minutes of picking, your back and the back of your legs hurt. If you did it all day, you’d be miserable,” said Ashlea McGugan, a bilingual geography teacher at Oxnard high school.

The field lessons are the central part of this summer program aimed at preparing teachers at five Oxnard district schools to better instruct 1,000 high school migrant students, officials said.

“All educators want to involve parents in their students’ education, but teachers also need to understand the parents. And migrant parents have some unique characteristics,” said Joe Mendoza, director of the Migrant Education Program for Ventura County.

Mendoza said he and Walt Dunlop, the program director in Oxnard, noticed teachers’ frustration when migrant parents did not attend back-to-school conferences.

“I had worked with many of these parents, and so I knew that they cared a great deal,” Dunlop said. “I also came to understand that they had very unpredictable lives and a different perspective on school.”

During the workday Friday, Dunlop and Mendoza told the laboring teachers about the unpredictability of a farm worker’s life.

“The life of a migrant farm worker revolves around supply and demand. You may wake up thinking that you’re going to pick onions, and get to the field and find out the price was too low and they plowed them under. And then you don’t get paid,” Mendoza said.

By the 2 p.m. end of the workday, the roving band of novice farm workers had turned reflective.

Most appreciated the experience, but knew that when it was all over they would drive home in air-conditioned cars.

“We are only playing field workers,” McGugan said. “I figured out that I would have earned about $3 an hour. At the rate I was picking, I probably would have been fired.”

Their reactions to the experimental program were overwhelmingly positive.

“We should definitely do this again,” Rice said. “But next time, we should go home and have dinner with the workers and stay at their homes.”

The others wearily nodded in agreement.