Some Thought about Immigrants,Teaching, Etc.

My brother Donald lives in Charleston, South Carolina. He is currently in the process of writing our family's history. Yesterday I received Chapter 3. He is doing a beautiful job and I am anxiously awaiting Chapter 4.
Chapter 3 dealt with my parents' immigration to America. Both left their native land seeking a bettter life in America. My father was discriminated against before the tender he was on was out of sight of his native Ireland and headed for the ocean liner waiting in the open Atlantic. (Ireland did not have a harbor deep enough to accomodate the larger ship.) As my father watched his native land recede in the background, a British sailor shouted at him, " GET BELOW BEFORE I THROW YOU OVERBOARD!" My father never forgot those stinging words. (I guess I get my sensitivity to insults from my father.) I won't relate here the history of the Irish in America with the "Irish need not apply" signs and all. Most, if not all, ethnic groups have experienced the same thing, and it has been a very sad and costly part of the human experience.
The United States as it is today was built by hard-working people like my father and mother. They were fortunate in that when they stepped off the boat in Boston, they already knew English. Countless others did not. and had to go to evening classes to learn English after working in a factory all day.
But enough of all this. This is all well known. With all this as a background, here, in writing is what I believe about immigrant students and teaching them:
1. They deserve the full respect of the teacher in front of them.
2. They deserve a teacher who knows the students' needs and is intellectually prepared to meet them.
3. They deserve a teacher who has adequate materials to meet minimum teaching standards.
4. They deserve to be taught in a school that not unlike a computer with the Norton Anti-virus protection, also has adequate outside supervision to guard against exploitation of the immigrant student. (This supervision need not be stifling.)
Tomorrow morning I will be saying goodbye temporarily to a student whom I have been tutoring in advanced English recently. He is a doctor, speaks three languages, and will be returning to his native Pakistan for two weeks. His story is different as is all the other immigrant stories, BUT the same in that he is contributing to this wonderful nation, and what a pleasure it has been for me to have been a small part of his life.