Author: admin

I recently heard Robin Roberts talk about a piece of advice from her mother that has spoken to her throughout her career, “Make your mess your message.” So today, I will talk about the main “messes” in my life that I wish to make my “messages”. There are a few.

First, I grew up in poverty. That was a “mess”, as society might label it, that was handed down because of the circumstances that I was born into. However, I want to be very clear that growing up in poverty has very beautiful lessons. This is one of my messages.

Secondly, I loved math and science from the time I played outdoors, with a freedom to explore and learn on my own terms. Then in school, I was socialized to think like a scientist. I connected this with my own learning. Then in college, I was unconsciously asked to strip myself of my identity to fit it. This is my second “mess” that I would like to make my message–you should be able to be you and do what you love.

Lastly, for now, the third “mess” that is my message is to think about what you think. Yes, think about your thoughts and where they are coming from. I am not a psychologist, which many times I wish I had studied psychology more in depth, but I do know about my own experiences that shaped this message. This message comes from a sincere desire to make the world a better place through actively deconstructing deficit ideologies.

Today, I’ll speak about this third “mess”.

What are deficit ideologies? They are the negative thoughts and beliefs that we have about someone or something; many times it’s a group of people. These beliefs usually come from stereotypes about certain people because of their gender or race, but this could be associated with many attributes of a person. I’ll give you some examples of deficit ideas in the classroom: (1) Language deficit: A student walks in and speaks with an accent that you identify as foreign, unknown to you. You think, I don’t want them in my class projects; they will not do a good job. They can’t even speak English well! (2) Gender deficit: A female student feels inadequate in her Calculus course. There are few women and she has heard messages that women are not good at math. She has a deficit belief about her abilities. (3) Other deficits: A student walks into a classroom, sits in the back, and sleeps often. The professor tells another professor, “I have a student that sleeps most of the time in my class. I don’t know why they even bother to come. They are obviously uninterested or lazy. The parents must pay for them to come to college and want them to major in engineering.”

Deficit ideologies may be informed by many pieces of data–personal experience, societal stereotypes, social expectations, historical beliefs, racism or other forms of discrimination. Deficit ideologies usually take form without knowing much information about a person.

I personally have been a victim of deficit ideologies. Here is an example: as a Latina, people such as professors or hiring supervisors or research team members or teaching faculty have thought that I can’t do a job or succeed in learning something. They may have doubted my capabilities. They may not say it to me directly, but I can hear it in the way they communicate with others about me or how they communicate with me. One mistake and they are ready to remind me of what I don’t know or what I am deficient in.

Deficit ideologies also tend to continue living this way. If that student that comes in late and sits in the back of the room only to fall asleep gets an F on an exam, it confirms your deficit beliefs about the student. (Confirmation bias. More on this later.) This bad grade causes the professor to continue believing the negative ideas about the student that “they don’t care”, which impacts how the professor interacts or doesn’t interact with the student, which in turn causes the student to remain uninterested or disconnected, feeding the deficit ideology cycle again and again.

This may cause persons that are victims of deficit ideologies to fight, fight, fight to prove these ideas (and people) wrong or withdraw, give up, and look for something else. Thinking about this makes me sad. Fighting to prove people wrong only causes battle fatigue, a feeling I know all too well. I attribute my departure from Mathematics and Computer Science to the battle fatigue I experienced at MIT as an undergraduate student. I was so tired of being in all-guy groups where my ideas were constantly questioned, even though I had already done the work to show that they were right. At one point, I said to myself, I’m not going to care what they think; I’m just going to do my work. But as you know, team assignments, study groups, and even jobs happen in social spaces, not in isolation. There is always an exchange with people.

Sometimes I wonder if people who have deficit ideologies about others simply reject them to make themselves feel better about the person’s work, abilities, or image.

So as a professor who seeks to share this message with others, what is it that I do to fight deficit ideologies? What do I recommend for other well-intentioned faculty who want to challenge their deficit ideologies? First of all, this is great that you have the intent to challenge your beliefs. However noble, it’s not enough. Reflecting often about our decisions and actions and why we took these routes and not others is important. If you notice deficit ideologies spring up in your “why”, then challenge them. The challenge is the most important part. As humans, we are looking for proof to our beliefs. What if we looked for proof against negative beliefs? I usually seek to get to know a person more. I seek to learn more about what they have done in the past, what motivates them to be here, and I try to find connections. I also change the way I approach all people; instead of thinking the worst about a person, I think the best about them.

What? What did I do? What was my decision? What was the action behind this decision?

So what? So what does this mean? So what do these actions say about my beliefs?

Now what? Now what am I going to do about these beliefs? Now what am I going to do to challenge any deficit beliefs? Now what am I going to do differently?

For some reason, it comes easier to me to think positively about my students. As a mother, I see them as someone else’s children and believe that they are still learning. I try to get to know how they learn, what motivates them, what they want to do in the future, how they want to change the world. This always helps break down any deficit ideas that I may have about any of my students.

However, there are students who have internalized deficit ideologies presented to them throughout their lives. These, I call, traumatic educational experiences. Trauma is a different beast. Again, I am not a psychologist, but I have seen many students come into my math-heavy courses with trauma from past math experiences. As they sought to learn math, perhaps they struggled, and they may not have been treated well by their previous teachers, perhaps because of deficit beliefs about who is good at math and who is not good at math. This builds up and harms the student’s confidence. Imagine the type of trauma that I see when a student is scared to make a mistake as I try to teach in a one-on-one setting. It’s not fun to see. This is what I’m trying to avoid.

Many professors have such deficit beliefs about who is good at math and who isn’t. Some examples of these beliefs include: (1) You must solve problems quickly to be good at math. If you’re slow at arriving to the solution, you must not be good at math. (2) If I, as the professor, explain it to you (doesn’t matter how I explain it), you should be able to get it. If you don’t understand, then you must not be good at math.

These ideas SUCK. All professors should understand that learning takes time, that we must make mistakes in order to learn, that mistakes are good, that explaining things one way just because we learned it that way is not the only way to learn it, and there are many other beliefs that we need to question.

So in summary, deficit ideologies suck. We all may experience them. We need to think about what we believe in order to begin challenging deficit beliefs. Getting to know people better helps challenge these ideologies. Expanding our experiences as learners and teachers also helps.

My name is Karina Ivette Vielma, pronounced in Spanish. I was born in Eagle Pass, Texas, a small town bordering Mexico. Spanish was my first language, the language of my grandparents, and love was abounding in my family.

To begin to understand my present, you must understand my past. My parents, Francisco and Irene, married in Mexico and came to the U.S. during a time when Mexican workers were encouraged to come to the U.S. for employment. Mom and Dad followed opportunities and dreamed of one day returning to Mexico to live and raise their family. However, life led them to establish their home in Eagle Pass, close to my father’s family and where Dad had work opportunities.

Employment opportunities were better in Texas than they were in Mexico for my father, but we still lived in poverty. My childhood home was built without a foundation, as many homes were in Mexico. Mom would sprinkle a bit of water and sweep the dirt floor. We had an outhouse, and Dad built the four walls and a roof with his own hands to keep us safe. We spent many winter nights under multiple colchas (blankets) to keep us warm. Many summer nights were spent sweating under thin bedsheets to keep the mosquitos from eating me alive. When Dad left for work on cold days, I still remember him tucking us in tightly under the blankets to keep us warm.

I was their firstborn and my brother came to our family when I was two years old. Our family of four slept in one room for a while before my middle sister was born. Then Mom and Dad built another room and a restroom. No more outhouse. We, instead, got to share one bathroom and shower. Sometimes, if we needed to pee REALLY badly, we went outside the house where no one could see. Shortly after my middle sister was born, my little brother came along. We were a family of six by the time I was seven years old. My youngest sister didn’t join the clan until I was 13. She completed our family of seven.

As toddlers, Mom bathed my brother and me in a tub with a mixture of tap and boiled water, which was heated in a gas stove. I played outdoors as a child, looking at the patterns in the sun, the birds, the insects, flowers, leaves, the seasons…I often got nosebleeds climbing trees. I laid on the grass looking at the clouds, sometimes getting bit by ants. I collected wildflowers and interesting rocks, and chased butterflies and light bugs. I even caught some flying insects with my hands and put them in jars with holes. I learned quickly that nature was not to be kept in a jar for my enjoyment. The insects, butterflies, even the flowers lived longer in their nature homes–free.

I still remember going to visit my family in Mexico as a kid and taking thirdhand clothes and food, leche y mantequilla. Even though we didn’t have much, I felt like we were rich, sharing our resources mostly with family and also with other people in Mexico. In school, however, I received free lunch, recycled my clothes often during the week, and even received a free jacket and clothes from a government assistance program. Most of my clothes were secondhand from a “shop” at a lady’s house. The lady lived in our neighborhood and was a short walk, about four blocks from where we lived. She bought used clothes in bulk and sold it from her house. You would catch us often sitting on top of the mounds of clothes looking for pieces that would fit us for school or a special occasion. Sometimes, we would find name brand clothes, of which I knew very little, but which later was noticed by teachers or friends.

Since I can remember, I wanted to go to school. Before going to school, Mom says that I would take a book under my arm and tell her that I was going to school. I would say, “Bye! I’m going to school” in Spanish. Because Spanish was my first language, I learned English in the classroom. I still remember crying for my dad to stay with me as I studied my English words assigned by my mean Kindergarten teacher. I was learning the meanings, spellings, and pronunciation of words and phrases like, “inside” and “outside”, “on top” and “on the bottom”. Dad took a cassette recorder and recorded the words for me to repeat. In his broken English, he left me a piece of him as he went to a technical school in Piedras Negras, the Mexican town across the border from Eagle Pass. Crying, I studied.

Because of some negative early experiences in my education, I could have easily hated school, but Dad told me he didn’t want me or any of my siblings to be working as hard as he was working. He would show me his dirty hands and clothes, sunburned face, and tired demeanor. He told me from a young age that I was the leader of my siblings, that I needed to set a good example for them to follow, and that education would get us out of poverty. I believed him.