High School Students From Blanchardville Met With Teens From Lake View High School In Chicago
A bus full of chattering high school students went silent as their bus pulled onto the rural highway leading to Blanchardville, Wisconsin.
The bus was from Lake View High School in Chicago, now well on its way to Pecatonica High School in southern Wisconsin.
"Everyone sort of got quiet and just started looking out their windows," said Brian Wittenwyler, a math, science and special education teacher at Lake View. "They were pretty nervous coming in, and getting off the bus and seeing their school."
The Lake View and Pecatonica students were brought together as part of a classroom exchange between Wittenwyler and Grant Hambrick, a math teacher at Pecatonica.
Wittenwyler’s students — many immigrants, some undocumented — had been left reeling after the presidential election. They felt a need for dialogue and understanding with someone different from them.
Hambrick was fascinated with the opportunity. His class, rural and 98 percent white, also felt they could learn from talking to some city kids one state over.
Wittenwyler said his class addressed their prejudices up front before the meeting.
"We could go into that discussion sort of knowing who we are and what our faults were so we would be open for dialogue," Wittenwyler said. "So that the sharing and the discussions would be meaningful."
Hambrick’s class went through a similar exercise in preparation.
"We also had discussions about stereotypes and what we thought the kids were going to be like. A lot of negative stereotypes did come out," he said.
But at the same time, the classes hoped to find similarities from the meeting. Hambrick wanted it to be more than just a meeting between a red state and a blue state.
"We wanted to share ourselves and see what all we had in common," Hambrick said.
Still, they weren’t sure what to expect once they met face to face. Hambrick’s students wondered if the Chicagoans would find Blanchardville boring.
Luckily, there was a built-in icebreaker in Blanchardville: a visit to a working dairy farm, a first for most of the Lake View students.
"I think the barriers between us just started to collapse," Hambrick said. "And it just allowed everybody to try to relax."
Pecatonica students showed off their farm animals, and talked about their lives.
Later on, the classes met again in Chicago, and talked social issues. They made their own personality pie charts, dividing their lives into areas such as ethnicity, sexuality and race.
One Lake View student shared how her race affects her life, explaining how strongly it is associated with her identity.
"We used that as a talking point," Wittenwyler said. "I think a lot of kids in Blanchardville were like, 'That’s not really something that we think about or consider on a daily basis.'"
