Students Get a Close-Up Look At the Life of a Migrant Worker

Lectures Aim to Broaden Perspectives With Practical Lessons

In a classroom at a private school in Annapolis, migrant worker Gerardo Reyes-Chavez addressed students who were about the age he was when he first began to work, asking whether they would leave Annapolis to labor in a foreign country.

"Would you guys leave behind everything you know to go to a country you didn't know, and know that you might not ever see your family for 10, 11 years?"

The group of more than a dozen seventh-graders at the Key School sat in silence, looking as if they couldn't comprehend the question.

"As workers, we don't necessarily come here because we want to," Reyes-Chavez continued in Spanish, as an interpreter translated. Poverty, the students learned, had forced many of the workers to go to the United States.

Reyes-Chavez, a 30-year-old native of Mexico and a member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group fighting for the rights of migrant workers, spoke to students in grades 7 through 12 last week as part of the Key School's in-depth study of migrant farm laborers.

Students assumed roles in a hypothetical agricultural cooperative to learn about the marketplace. Another assignment had them on their hands and knees outside, harvesting clover with strict instructions to clear dirt from the stems. The exercises were supported by more traditional study that involved reading and writing about migrant workers.

Students were allowed to sign a petition that is part of the coalition's effort to protect migrant workers' rights.

"We teach them to be critical thinkers and critical questioners," said Becky Schou, head of the middle school's humanities department.

The Key School, with classes from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, was founded in 1958 by tutors from St. John's College in Annapolis. Like St. John's, it employs interdisciplinary teaching, said Irfan Latimer, a school spokeswoman.

In English class, Latimer said, students seek to answer questions such as: What influence does man have on society, and what influence does society have on man? In civics class, students examine the influence of people on a democratic society and how a democracy affects its citizens, she said.

Students have taken a range of positions on immigration reform and related issues, with some sympathizing with migrant workers but ultimately supporting the business side.

"They don't see any other way to make it work," Schou said.