Marco Zamarron

About Marco Zamarron

http://www.colby.edu/directory_cs/mazamarr/

Posts by Marco Zamarron:

Now What?

Marco Zamarron / Globally Elite / Challenge, Chile, Croft School, What Now /

December 7, 2016

As this class comes to an end, I find myself asking what now? What should we do with all the data that we gathered and the discussions that we had? Do we just forget about it and move on with our lives? Do we just bury this knowledge while we focus on our classes next semester and let it slowly escape our minds? I don’t speak for everyone but I do know what I am going to do with it.

It all starts with the now. I go to Colby freakin’ College. A college where I am still a minority but I have a louder voice. In class I can voice my thoughts and experiences to more and more people. I show people who come from elite backgrounds, or different backgrounds in general, what life in someone else’s shoes is like, to a certain point. I am making a change here by telling people about my schooling experience at KIPP: Austin Collegiate while they went to Catholic schools, boarding schools, private schools, etc. I am using my resources in order to bring about a change. When I am out in society people choose to engage in conversation with me or not but in class we all choose to be in these conversations. Now is the time to voice my opinions, which would be silenced elsewhere.

The student that we interviewed, Alejandro, said that he didn’t realize that he was privileged until he was 10 and noticed that he had maids working for him. He said that he was aware of his socio economic status. Not once did he say that he thought that good teachers should be available to all students rich or poor. Nor did he mention the students who are protesting for tuition free colleges and universities in Chile. He acknowledged that he was part of the elite but at the same time he didn’t. As part of acknowledging where you are is to see how other people live. You have to acknowledged that there are people struggling to provide food for their kids because they can’t get good jobs as they didn’t have the money to go to college. Their parents, too, lacked an education because they needed to work to make money for their family. All of this happened because we live in a society that simply reproduces socio economic status! We can’t just acknowledge that there’s an issue and then proceed to walk away from it. At this point you must be asking yourself, “well what are you going to do about it”?

“I come from an underprivileged background”, that is what I used to say but that has changed in a way. I am attending a PRIVATE liberal arts college. I have some layer of privilege now. I have a title that means something to people. I may not have a masters or a doctorate but I do have my foot in the door now. Before, that door was shut and had a padlocked on it but now I have my foot in the door. I plan to go back to my underprivileged neighborhood and helping the kids out there. I don’t know if I will be a teacher, a counselor, a principal, a layer, or open the next KIPP school but what I do know is that I will make a change in my neighborhood. I will be a positive role model for all these underprivileged kids. I will show them, and coach them, in any way I can that no matter what society says about us or where we come from we can make it out.

The research that we have done as a class will reach out to hundreds, if not thousands of people. All these blogs will reach eyes that are millions of miles away from us. So I ask you, the person that is reading this blog and the research on this website, what now? What are you going to do about this?

How blind are we to privileged?

Marco Zamarron / Globally Elite / be the change, Chile, Croft School, privilege /

November 22, 2016

How can you not see your privileged?

How do you go through life not seeing that your house is bigger than that of your peers?

How can you walk right past your brothers and sisters that are out on the streets begging for money?

How can you eat and throw away half your food knowing how many people out there are dying of hunger?

How can you not see the bitter reality?

These are all great questions but the real question is, what happens when we do realize how privileged we are? Do we change the way we live to reflect our newfound knowledge? Do we go out and give change to every homeless person we see or just a couple? Do we keep reminding ourselves about our own privilege or do we talk about it for a couple days and then forget about it? After we leave our social justice class or our elite schooling classes do we go out in to the real world better understanding our privilege and how we can help others or does it all go flying out the window as soon as we step into the hallway?

People of color, like myself, have lived through life being oppressed; beat down, harassed, persecuted, and preyed on. When we talk about reproduction of elite we are talking about institutions like Colby. We are those students that come from underprivileged neighborhoods and backgrounds that we talk about in class. We are those kids who have had all odds against them from the beginning yet we have had to adjust and grind in order to get to where we are. We know how privileged we are to be at a place like Colby. We know how we are being taught to be elite and how to handle that title of elite-ness. The difference is that if you ask any of us what we plan on doing after Colby you will see that we plan to go back to the communities where we came from and bring more of our “kind” out of the shadows. We will use our elite-ness to bring forth a change in this world. We will not stand by idle and wait for someone who is considered “old money” to bring this change for us. We will take our cumulative knowledge and go out to change the world around us. The issue with the world is that sometimes we are not blind to our privilege but we ignore it. We rather turn the other way around when we see a homeless person begging for money. We rather not think about how some kids out there will never make it out of middle school. We focus so much on ourselves that we never really open our eyes to the real world. Sometimes we need to step back and look at the broader picture and bring about that change that is desired by thousands, if not millions.

Global Citizens or Elite Citizen?

Marco Zamarron / Globally Elite / Chile, Croft School, Elite, Elite-ness, Global Citizen /

October 25, 2016

After looking at The Croft School’s website for a bit I began to see a lot of connections with my old middle and high school. One of the biggest similarities is the idea of global citizenship. I remember when I was in school we had two field lessons a month. One was to go see universities/colleges and the other was to go do community service. I remember that we used to go to parks and spend the day planting trees, repainting signs or walls, and picking up trash. When we were out on field lessons, one of our mottos was to always leave the place better than we found it. The difference between The Croft School and our school was that we weren’t focused on being global citizens we were focused on giving back to our community.

We visited parks and neighborhoods around our school and where we came from and when wherever we went, we made a difference. We focused on our immediate future and tried to clean up the areas that we spent most of our time in. We knew that once we graduated school we would be going out to bigger places and making a difference wherever we ended up, but we had to start in the places where we lived. One can’t expect to change the world without taking care of business in their backyard.

On The Croft School’s website, one thing that stood out was the following quote: “We want to form young people who will be useful to the country and are trustworthy.” This made me question, how involved are they teaching their students to be? Are they teaching them to get involved in the community no matter what the issue may be? Or are they teaching them to pick and choose what they get involved in? I believe that as elite members of society they have to watch their reputation. I wouldn’t see these kids being taught to get involved in events like the protest for free education in Chile because of a fear of being kicked out of their school and their elite group. How useful are they teaching their kids to really be? Are they really teaching them to be part of a global community or the globally elite?

From a cafeteria to “The Hill”

Marco Zamarron / Globally Elite / Chile, Code Switching, Croft School, KIPP, No Excuses, Who am I? /

October 3, 2016

My educational experience started the day that I signed a contract, known as the Commitment to Excelence, at the age of 10, in order to enroll into a school called KIPP: Austin College Prep. This contract was written by the school and it had to be signed by my parents, my advisor, and myself before I could even step foot on the campus. The contract basically says that I will be an examplary student at all times and that my parents agreed to push me and support me no matter what. (If you follow the link on the words “commitment to excelence” and you scroll down you can download the contract so you can see it. It hasn’t changed since I was in 5th grade.) I say that my educational experience started this late in my life because before I was just passed through the system waiting to land on someone’s desk that was willing to help. When my parents made the decision to move me to KIPP I

did try to resist the change that they wanted to instill on me. As a kid I was stuck in a system where I wasn’t expected to make anything of myself so I carried myself in that way. It wasn’t until I got to KIPP that I understood that it was me against the world and that there were “no excuses” for not thriving in this world. I couldn’t sit down with my arms crossed and blame the system for where I was in life.

Every Wednesday morning we would have a meeting in our cafeteria and we would highlight the values of our school, “No Excuses”, “All of us WILL learn”, “Team always beats individual”, etc. These ideas were repeated so often that I bought into them eventually. I went from reading at a 2nd grade level, when I was in 5th grade, to reading at a high school level by the time I was in 8th grade. When I went on to high school I went to another KIPP school called KIPP: Austin Collegiate. This is where I saw the difference between charter schools and private elite schools.

In my time at KIPP: Austin Collegiate I was also playing football for ST. Stephen’s Episcopal school. Her

e is where I had my first interactions that would help me succeed in a place like Colby. While I was here I saw how we were “othered” because I came from a different school. On Fridays we would have team dinner before games and I saw how their cafeteria looked more like a restaurant. They had tables made of pure wood and wooden chairs while we had lunch tables that folded up after every lunch. They had ice cream machines, juice and milk dispensers while we had coolers with ice where we got our milk carton from. The guys that came from my school sat with the kids who were on scholarship at St. Stephen’s and the rich would sit apart. On Thursday nights after practice we would go to a teammate house to eat a team dinner before Friday night and this is where I felt the most out of place. We would walk into these houses that were two stories high, had 5 rooms and 3 bathrooms, a pool that overflowed into the lake that had people water skiing and riding around in small boats. We would have to be escorted in and out of the neighborhoods by security just so the rest of the neighbors felt safe but we didn’t dare say anything to the coaches because we felt like that wasn’t our place.

When we were in the locker room things weren’t that different. At first we had our own little section where all the guys from KIPP would be. I noticed that even though there were more people of color on that team they were different because they had money. It wasn’t until later on in the three years that we played football for them that we started to be more and more accepted into the community. Things started to flow better but I still won’t forget how things started.

This all helped me when I got to Colby because what happened at St. Stephen’s is happening here. I still sit with the people that look like me. I still have one little section for me and that is where I am expected to feel “safe”. I learned how to code switch between the people who looked like me and those that didn’t. At the end of the day I learned to play the game. KIPP showed me the tenacity and tools that I needed to succeed while St. Stephen’s showed me how to try to blend in and when to stand out in a different environment.