When Lia-Lucine Cary was a child, her grandfather taught her a valuable lesson — that educating oneself is the most important thing one can do. Today as a middle school teacher in Hawaii, Cary teaches that lesson to her students who are raised in a culture that doesn’t encourage college as an option.
“It’s just not something that is in the everyday vocabulary,” Cary wrote in an email.
To bring college into the vocabulary, the 24-year-old UF classics and anthropology graduate started requesting that students and alumni from colleges across the nation send in letters or college paraphernalia to share with her seventh-grade students.
She plans to inform her students of college possibilities in a place where only 65 out of 100 freshmen will graduate high school, and of those, 34 will attend college, according to an article in Honolulu Magazine, she wrote.
Cary started teaching after college while living with her grandparents in Istanbul, Turkey. She worked at a refugee camp where illegal residents’ children were educated
“I started feeling really desperate for these kids and worrying about their futures,” Cary wrote. “For the first time, I stopped thinking about myself.”
With this new perspective, she returned to the United States. In the email she expressed that like Turkey, many educational opportunities depend on socio-economic status.
“It was like a veil had been lifted from my eyes,” she wrote. “I started realizing that the situation was not so different in my own country.”
Cary now teaches at Kealakehe Intermediate School in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, an experience that she says has revealed the value of teaching for her.
“This work, although literally endless, was one of the most meaningful things I have ever done in my life,” she wrote. “I mean, this is our future we are talking about.”
Since her time in Hawaii, Cary has noticed cultural trends that might contribute to the lack of college emphasis.
Because of the illegal annexation of Hawaii, many Hawaiians don’t view themselves as American, but as Hawaiian, Cary wrote. This creates resentment for the cultural norms of the mainland, like going to college.
There also seems to be an emphasis on teaching for state-issued tests, like the FCAT, which determine a school’s funds rather than long-term goals, an issue that exists all over the United States, Cary wrote.
On a smaller scale, Kailua-Kona is a rural area, a contrast to the tourist-driven Hawaii that people are used to.
“The students here are quite isolated and naive, in the sense that they don’t know what is going on on the global scale,” she wrote.
This naivety is beneficial because students tend to be more respectful, Cary wrote, but it can be frustrating because they don’t have the drive to better themselves.
Cary also takes note of her students’ strong family and community connections. Parents don’t want their children to go away to college because they’re afraid their child won’t come back, she wrote.
With this project, Cary aims to break the mentality that college isn’t a viable option. She has two goals for her students: to inform them of what college is about and to inspire them to work for it.
“I am hoping that if I can start them strong in middle school,” she wrote, “it will keep them going through high school and beyond.”
In her own seventh-grade classroom, Cary encounters students who inspire her.
Kyle, who even with a mother raising four children and working two jobs, has never missed a homework assignment and wants to join the Air Force, she wrote.
There’s Stan, who takes the Helion, a bus that goes around the island once every day, ensuring he’ll get to school two hours early to be tutored by Cary.
There is also Andre, whose mother left him when he was young, and whose father is in jail, but who overcomes these obstacles at school each day.
“He comes to school every day with the biggest smile you have ever seen and works so hard,” Cary wrote.
Sometimes, Cary hears other teachers talk about how only a select few students are capable of attending college.
“I believe any student with the will and support from school,” she wrote, “has the ability to attend college, if this is what they want.”
Students and alumni can email Cary for information on how to help her project at lialucine@gmail.com.
