Julia Meyer Bell
Fallbrook, CA
I teach high school English, and Andre is one of my students. He is proud to be “Dominican American” (not to be confused with African American). One day in class we were sharing stories about earlier schooling experiences, and he talked about how the nuns in his New York City Catholic school “really did rap kids — hard! — on the knuckles, and they called me ‘Andrew’ , and I hated that because it’s not my name. Everybody had to have a Catholic name.”