Foreign language department teacher Anna Rogers (center) stands as a child during a church choir performance. Rogers says that the community she was raised in instilled values in her that she now strongly disagrees with. “A lot of people there had a lot of hatred toward the idea of someone coming into the country without speaking English. As a child, I believed in that, too,” Rogers said. “I feel terrible saying it now because I realize obviously how wrong it was.” Photo courtesy of Anna Rogers
The ODYSSEY Media Group will provide viewers with stylized profiles that center on people in the Athens community telling their own stories.
Clarke Central High School foreign language department teacher Anna Rogers was taught to believe that people who didn’t speak English had no place in our country. The transition from that girl into who she is today began in a small apartment building in her hometown.
Twenty-seven years ago, a girl was born into a community that taught her that Mexicans who didn’t speak English had no place in our country. It taught her that they were a waste of space, that she was better than them for speaking “the country’s language.”
How did that little girl become a fluent Spanish teacher and advocate for human rights?
Without the after-school program at an apartment building near her school, Anna Rogers might have never seen the reality of the situation of Spanish-speaking immigrants.
The program was designed to help students without English-speaking parents complete their homework. Anna began working there in fifth grade.
She found that the plain-looking apartment building she had seen many times before was more complex than it seemed. Inside were hundreds of immigrants and their children, living together in crowded rooms.
Several things caused Anna’s change of heart, but nothing hit her harder than seeing the way all those people had to live.
“I started seeing the pedestal some people were talking from. When I started working at the apartment, I saw how poor and needy they were. Those people had nothing,” Anna said.
The simple program to help children with their homework was so much more to her. It was a window into the lives of the people she had always been taught to look down on.
Was the lack of speaking English really a reason for them to have to live that life?
“I don’t think someone’s lack of education, or lack of English as a resource, should be any means to cut them out of the picture,” Anna said.
Growing up, all she had to base her views on were what others taught her. Why would she question what she was taught? It came from the people she trusted most.
But those people were looking at the situation from the outside, just like her.
In order to begin to understand the reality of it at all, she had to change the way she saw things and look at it from the inside.
