I’ve often wondered why schools don’t have more family-friendly schedules around the holidays to make it easy for kids attending schools far from home.
Let’s face it. It’s a drag to be stuck in a dorm for the holidays. But I know there probably will be a few kids left to fend for themselves this year.
Thanksgiving is just too short. It’s also too close to the end of the school year and Christmas for some families to budget a second cross-country trip home.
It does, however, create an opportunity for one of higher education’s best diversity moments: the personal invite home from a roommate’s parents.
As a scholarship kid from California going to school in the Boston area, most people at my school didn’t know what a Filipino American was.
At the time, the only connection to the Philippines most had was maybe World War II. They’d seen the 1945 John Wayne film, “Back to Bataan,” and might have remembered the Filipino military man in the movie — played by Anthony Quinn, who just happened to be a Mexican American Hispanic actor, known more for playing a Greek (Zorba) but who played the Filipino hero, Capt. Andres Bonifacio in “Bataan.”
So imagine when I showed up at dinner as the cold, hungry, stray college kid—the perfect appreciative dinner guest.
