Scullen Middle students learn about the frustration in immigration

Matt Robb knew he was going to have some frustrated kids on his hands.

He couldn't have expected anything less. Try jamming 450 eighth-graders into cramped quarters, making them shift their feet endlessly in slow-moving lines and then speaking to them in a language they may not understand. It's a recipe for crabby-a-la-mode.

Robb didn't care. In fact, he was kind of looking forward to it.

If there was one thing the history teacher wanted students at Naperville's Scullen Middle School to learn, it's this: it wasn't easy being a newly arrived immigrant at Ellis Island in 1910.

And things didn't get a whole lot better once you made your way past that congested entry point into the teeming streets of New York City.

"We want to give them an appreciation for what people had to go through and endure just to come here, and how much it shaped the country we've become," Robb said.

Along with dozens of teachers, teacher assistants and parent volunteers, Robb and fellow history teacher Nat Osmani gave students a taste of those challenges during an all-day Ellis Island simulation on Thursday.

Students were divided into families representing different countries and class structures who had to pick their way through the myriad obstacles of the immigration process around the turn of the past century.

They'd been given time in advance to research what life may have been like for people with certain last names and from certain countries.

On the day of the simulation, many arrived at the makeshift Ellis Island wearing period clothes and struggling to find their way through the process of gaining entry to the Land of Opportunity.

"We try to re-create what it was like as much as possible," Osmani said.

That meant students had to stand in cramped lines and sometimes be questioned or examined by people speaking languages they couldn't comprehend.

Once the students navigated that mine field, they found themselves entering the second part of the simulation -- the streets of New York -- in search of a job, food and housing.

There they learned about discrimination against women and certain ethnic groups, and the difficulties of surviving without much money.

The quicker they learned to band together with similar "families" and pool their resources, the quicker they found the way to success.

"The kids get frustrated," Robb said. "There's a lot of waiting and standing around. Sometimes we make them do push-ups or sit against a wall. In the end, they have a better idea and appreciation for what these people went through."

The Ellis Island simulation has become a mainstay for eighth-graders at most Indian Prairie Unit District 204 middle schools.

You'd think a lot of the students would have heard about it from older siblings or friends and be prepared for some of the challenges, but Robb says that rarely happens, at least partly because teachers are constantly tweaking things.

"More often than not, they don't know what to expect," he said.

The program also reaches into other classrooms. Students may read period poetry or excerpts from firsthand accounts of life in the early 1900s in literature classes and study diseases of the period in science.

In their history classes, Robb and Osmani try to draw connections between the challenges facing those early immigrants with those confronting newcomers to our country today.

"A lot of kids in our classes have parents from another country," Robb said. "We try to tie things into today as much as we can."