Charlie, 16, parents from Cambodia: Well, my class, I mean the ESL students, we were all tight, ’cause we understand what we was all going through and stuff. But once you step foot out of that hallway, it was like, people will call you FOB—you know, Fresh Off the Boat—and like, you know, ‘where you coming from,’ you know, and ‘what are you trying to say,’ you know. Because we all got the accent going on—and we couldn’t help it. And at that point I really wished that I was someone else, that I’d be cool, like them, you know, because it was in middle school, you know, and I just wanted to be ‘down’ and stuff. But they didn’t want me ‘down.’ They picked on me. But I proved them wrong. I’m proving them wrong. *** Very, very few teachers understood my culture. It was really tough, and it really would have made a difference if they knew about what I was going through at home, it would have made a big difference. But I regret they didn’t, but you know, but for the future, I hope they, like, learn more about our Asian culture, what we’re going through, like being torn between two worlds and trying to learn English at the same time, you know. It would really help us a lot. But hopefully, they’ll learn about us.

Now in its sixth year as one of ten Regional Educational Laboratories sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the LAB (a program of Brown’s Education Alliance) serves the six New England states, New York, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Each regional lab focuses on an issue of national importance. The Brown LAB targets the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students, developing classroom and system wide approaches to meet them. www.lab.brown.edu

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Maema, 18, West Africa:

[Other students] made fun of you, you feel different. . . They are just having fun with us, having fun with our situation, which is very bad. It makes you feel scared, you don’t want to speak. If you want to express yourself, say what you really think, you can’t. You feel so scared that you can make a mistake in one thing, and all school’s gonna be know about that, and they’re gonna be calling you that one thing.

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Alfonso, 20, Guatemala:

Well, I was very, very frustrated, I think the first three months really of the school year, because I didn’t understand anything the teacher said. And she was a very, very nice person. She was always trying to help me. She was very patient. But sometimes I really, really was very upset with myself, because I have always been a perfectionist. I always like to do everything perfect the first time, and that was killing me.

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