dc.description.abstract | During the Winter quarter of the 1993-4 Kalamazoo College
academic year, I completed a student teaching internship with Foster
Senior High School in Tukwila, Washington, a small, rural suburb' of
Seattle in western Washington state. Tukwila, as a recognized city, is
young-approximately four-years-old-while as a rapidly developing
"mini-Seattle," it is only a few years older-perhaps seven years. Until
early 1991, Tukwila was known as "Unincorporated King County," a
collection of small farming areas not really suited for living that spread for
approximately ten miles, and made up a small part of the large
Washington county which includes Seattle and other ''big cities"; because
Tukwila, at that time, was predominately farmland and forest, Tukwila
was considered a small, farming community with a population of under
10,000.1 But Tukwila is changing, and has changed dramatically over the
past five years. It has developed into a "mini-metropolis" with all the
small-town charm of a Laura Ingles Wilder novel, and all the big-town
problems of the Bronx in New York City. During the three months while
I was doing my internship in Tukwila, many major police-involved
incidents occured: A student from a rival high school was shot and killed;
a student from that same school committed suicide; shoppers at the
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major-albeit only-mall in Tukwila were killed in a drug-related drive-
1 Because Tukwila at that time was "unincorporated," it did not "belong," in a sense, to any
county laws. It was, judisdally speaking, a void. And therefore was not subject to
"official" population counts.
by shooting; two other incidents of drive-bys occured; the house across the
street from me was a "suspected" crack house .... And I could go on. I felt
as though I was teaching in Detroit, yet knew I was living in Oshtemo. | en_US |