Woes of an 8th Grader Without a Motherland

I recently went to Seattle and on the way back, I spent approximately 5.5 hours chatting with a middle-aged postal worker of dubious respectability. After excitedly recounting the time that he took his twelve-year-old to the red light district in Amsterdam (and sent a picture of him holding a joint with the inscription "Wish You Were Here" to his wife), he brought up the fact that people (Canadian and otherwise) proudly display maple leaf patches while traveling abroad. I think that this was probably more common in the Bush era. I could probably write five blog posts about that conversation, but this is and will remain, a family blog.

Last week I discovered that the far left were not the only nationality deniers in our midst. I have a student who constantly proclaims that his dad is Turkish and his mother is Spanish. He proudly boasts of Spain's soccer dominance, as if he were somehow responsible for their victories. I have even started calling him "amigo español." His mother came in for parent night on Thursday and I innocently asked her what part of Spain she was from. She looked at me and laughed. "I am Mexican," she replied. "My son is always telling people that we are Spanish, but it isn't true." I asked her how she felt about his nickname, "amigo español" and she laughed for several minutes. After she left, I ran and found the other Mexican in the building, the janitor, and we sat in silence, feeling the cold sting of rejection from our countryman.