My Sixth Grade Teacher Said Unequal Pay Doesn’t Exist
By Yashavi Upasani
Graphic by Jas Calcitas
Equality was something I never heard about when I was younger. Growing up in Northern Virginia (NOVA), thirty to forty minutes outside of Washington D.C, I was surrounded by adults from all over the world. They came to America in hopes of a better life. They were Virginia residents who were also my friends and teachers.
Everyone in NOVA had an agenda: go to school, study hard, make friends, come home, go to sports practice, eat dinner, sleep, and repeat. There was no time to sit around and think about what was wrong in the world, let alone spend time talking about it.
In sixth grade, our end-of-the-year project was a persuasive essay on any topic we were interested in. I had always wanted to work on a project like this.
I like telling people that I was born to be a writer— born to tell stories, born to write about what I see, and born to state the wrongs I wanted to be righted. And there wasn’t a better time than the present.
The students started researching their topics; most kids were debating whether Monday should be considered a part of the weekend, or whether we should abolish the penny. I was on an entirely different track. Through a Washington Post article, I learned about how women are paid less than men— significantly less.
This was the first time I had ever heard of anything like that, I mean, how could we be paying someone less just because of their genitalia? After finding out about this disgustingly shocking fact, I knew what I was going to debate— my exact topic: Why women should be paid the same as men.
When I went to my sixth-grade teacher to tell him my topic he said, “I think you should change it.” I asked why. He laughed, “Well it’s just not true. My wife [who is also a teacher] doesn’t get paid less than me just because she’s a woman. Also, women tend to go for lower jobs anyway. I think you should really change it.”
At eleven years old, I hadn’t then mastered the art of staying calm and arguing back. Instead, I told him I’ll think about it. For one, I didn’t want to start yelling because he was an ignorant person, and I didn’t have all my direct facts yet to prove him wrong either.
I ended up not changing my topic. I turned in my paper and received it back a few weeks later. He had marked certain parts that he liked, as all other teachers did. But on the very first page, before the essay even started, he wrote, “You have to understand, women go for lower-paying jobs. They don’t just get paid less because they are a woman.”
He never really liked me again after that. He probably had something against my desire for equality. He also probably didn’t like that I was a “feminist.”
In seventh grade, a year later, I had to write an essay again. But this time, it was on something we wanted to change. I knew immediately what I was going to write.
At this point, my sister was applying to colleges, and I got to witness first-hand what happens to Asian applicants. The Harvard case, where Asians were calling the university out on their lack of diversity and their minuscule Asian demographic, was still all over the news. I knew that I wanted to change that.
As an Asian-American, I couldn’t have my chances of going to a college where I wanted to go soiled by the color of my skin. So, my topic arose: I wanted the college admissions process to be more transparent so as not to discriminate against Asians.
Students were brought up to tell the teacher their topics. Again, most kids were writing about how they want to change the school start times to be later in the day. I told her mine, and she hated it. She called it “untrue.” I had learned from my situation last year, so this time I had websites and sources to back up my claim. My teacher dismissed those and told me to pick a new topic. I didn’t.
I got a B+ on the assignment. I was livid. It was the only assignment the entire year that I had put so much effort into. On the rubric I got back, I had apparently lost a lot of points because “the voice of the piece wasn’t there.” I call that “my teacher wanting to give me the lowest grade possible because she didn’t believe my topic.”
It’s interesting to think about these two experiences I faced barely twelve years into my life. As much as I want to place the blame on my educators’ ignorance, I realized that some of it had to fall on them. What I wrote about was never talked about.
I was 11 years old when I had learned that women were paid less, and 12 years old when I found out colleges could not accept you based just on the color of your skin. As each day goes by, I learn more and more about all the injustices that people face. Maybe, if it was talked about more within our busy Northern Virginia lifestyles, then it’s possible my teachers would have been more open, more understanding. If it was something that we taught children early on in their life, then maybe my paper on equality through paychecks wouldn’t have been as shocking or controversial, because my teacher would have read something like that before, by another student.
My generation, Gen Z, is arguably the most powerful generation because we’ve seen all the wrong, and we’re trying to make it right. Just imagine— had we learned about all of these inequalities in the world much earlier, and formed opinions as we learned more— how much we could have accomplished already.
I would love to blame my teachers all day long— their blindness and inability to not look at the world as it is. They lived a life where they only saw what black and white glasses showed them, and believed only things they had heard before and were familiar to them. We can play the blame-game for eons. We can say that the Boomer generation should have cared more about the world and, in not caring, they made Gen X ignorant and close-minded, which eventually led Millennials to be consumed by only what’s in front of them rather than the big picture. Ultimately, Gen Z becomes concerned about everything other than themselves— but that attitude is not going to fix anything.
If we want to see a world where a seventh grader’s two-page essay on discrimination in the college application system is celebrated and appreciated, we need to stop finding something or someone to blame, and instead teach children and those much younger than ourselves what’s wrong and what needs to change. We are the generation of change.
My sixth grade teacher didn’t believe me when I insisted women were paid less than men. My seventh grade teacher didn’t believe me when I proclaimed Asians were rejected from colleges because of their race. This will continue to happen if we don’t stand together, learn right from wrong, and teach it to the new generation that can and will change the world.