Growing up as the first child of immigrant parents, I developed very strong opinions and impressions of how culture influences attitudes regarding the value of education (as well as many other values). My parents came to the United States in the late 1950s from East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh—and which was originally part of India until 1948. The Aziz family beachhead in the United States came about because my father got a scholarship to pursue his Master’s studies in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. My father came to this country, completed his studies, then married my mother and brought her back over here to start our family.
The experience of getting the scholarship and coming to the U.S. had a profound effect on my father: it etched in his mind the power of education to pull a person out of near complete poverty into a life of wealth and security. East Pakistan was at the time (and it still is as Bangladesh) one of the poorest countries in the world. My father dedicated himself to his education there, on his own he found that he could take advantage of scholarship opportunities, and finally he left his homeland, traveling by train most of the way into Europe and then by ocean voyage (during which he was convinced he would die from sea sickness) across the Atlantic to arrive to the sight of Lady Liberty welcoming him to what would become his new homeland. Upon arriving in New York, there was a telegram waiting for him from the University instructing him to take a train from there to Chicago, and then to travel the rest of the way by Greyhound. When he looked up “Greyhound” in his pocket dictionary, he saw that it was a dog and said to himself, “If Americans can ride dogs, then so can I!”
Some of my earliest memories of my father involve education in some way or other. I remember when we lived in Troy, New York, there were these two very large gas or oil storage tanks (like the kind that you see for holding oil before shipping). I was maybe 3 years old at the time, but I remember clearly that every time we drove by those two tanks, my father would say to me, “As the pressure goes up, the volume goes down.” My first science lesson. It didn’t take me long to have that memorized, so that every time I saw the tanks, I would be the one to recite the lesson. So that, at least, is my first memory of how it all started.
Growing up, it was much “more of the same.” Everywhere my father discovered teaching moments. A statement that I often heard was, “you are a boy of letters,” though I didn’t understand that one right away. Before first grade, my father found out what text books I would be learning from that coming school year, and he would order them early in the summer. Then he would have me do the lessons in the book, or he would assign to me lessons of his own devising. Every day during the summer, I would do the work that he would leave for me from my books, and by the end of the summer, I was well ahead of my classmates when we started the academic year. Talk about being well prepared! We did this every summer until my junior year in high school… at which point I pulled a teenage rebellion.
But the ultimate message to me was that education was of primary importance in my life. I was never allowed to take a job while in school, since our family philosophy was that school was my main job. My parents never pulled me out of school for early starts on vacation as often did the parents of my classmates. In fact, everything we did as a family was dependent upon our school schedule coming first. My father died in 2002, before I completed my Master’s work—in fact, I finally went back in large part because of my father. And when I told my mother I was accepted at UF in the Educational Technology doctoral program, I could tell she was pleased in the way that meant I was doing something that would have made my father very happy indeed.
The road I took, however, was not a straight shot. I wasn’t a traditional student going immediately from high school to college—I chose instead to start working out of high school. When I graduated, my family (father, mother, and two younger sisters) all moved back to Bangladesh, leaving me on my own here in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where I grew up. I got a job with a courier company in the city and worked there for a little over a year before getting quitting. The owner of the company classified me as having been “laid off” so I could collect unemployment until I found new work. When I went to the DC unemployment office, I saw entire families sitting on the grounds outside the building, as though it was a picnic—people on blankets, in lawn chairs, and at card tables all entertaining themselves. When I entered the building, there were several impossibly long lines, so I found the line I was supposed to be in and attached myself to the end of it. Then I wait for it to move. And waited.
After three hours of standing in the line and only having moved a few feet, I finally got fed up and left. There were able-bodied men and women in that line, all waiting for their government hand out, many having brought friends and family members to keep them company and create the atmosphere of festivity out on the grounds. Something clicked in my mind on that day, and on the way home (to the room I rented from a family) I stopped a restaurant called Pizza Italia in my neighborhood. There was a Help Wanted sign in the window, so I went in, applied for the job of busboy, and I was hired on the spot. Probably a good three quarters of the people waiting for their unemployment checks could have applied for and gotten that busboy job, but they chose instead to take the government handout and not have to work. That was the point in time when I began my transformation from idealistic liberal youth into a conservative adult. And working at Pizza Italia was the part of my life when I realized I should have gone to college as my father had wanted. (Funny how parents turn out to be smarter than they seem!)
So while bussing tables, I began to consider my options. I had no money, other than what I earned at the restaurant. Fortunately, I could eat all the pizza and steak sandwiches (my favorite!) I wanted. I talked to some friends that were going to the local community college. So I went there and worked with a counselor to see how I could do the same, having almost no money. I learned that I could get a Pell grant and some student loans… all on my own. So that’s what I did, and now, about 27 years later, I’m working on my doctorate degree.
- Hap Aziz