Monday, May 19, 2025
Turtle Hook Middle School students created and presented 79 different poster boards representing the people and cultures from countries around the world. This was the first multicultural night that the school has ever done.
When a visitor entered the Turtle Hook gym for the evening, they received a little passport booklet where they could write down the different countries they visited through the room.
“The children chose the cultures,” said Catherine Visconti, a Spanish Language teacher at the school who organized the event. “It was either their culture or a culture they were interested in learning about.”
Some students chose to represent their own cultures. Wisline Saint-Fleur represented Haiti, because she is Haitian and has gone to school there. She said she learned about her culture at that school.
“I choose (Haiti) because I like it and it’s my first time showing my culture,” she said. “I like eating mangoes, taking a shower in the river. It has meant everything to me actually.”
Saint-Fleur said she feels that Americans are very welcoming and embrace her culture. “Sak pase” means “What’s up” in Haitian, and she said people will greet her in that way.
“American Black, Hispanic, if they’re not Haitian, they’ll all be like ‘Sak pase.’”
Many of the students chose cultures outside of their own that interested them. Hailey Maisonet, one of the students, decided to highlight Hawaiian culture.
“I felt like I always wanted to go there,” she said. “I just love their culture, it’s very unique. I just love how it’s so happy and they’re always together.”
Maisonet said her extensive reading habits inspired her to represent Hawaiian culture.
“I used to watch the news, and I like to read books,” she said. “I was reading this book and when I read about the tragedies of Pearl Harbor it made me want to read more into Hawaiian stuff. Then I found out a lot of cool stuff about it.”
Maisonet chose to write about Hawaii because she feels that Hawaiian culture doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.
“I feel like it’s not really seen,” she said. “It’s very underrated. A lot of people don’t really know about it. That’s the reason I wanted to write about it.”
Meanwhile, Chelsea Tamay chose to represent Monaco because her dad inspired her interest in car racing.
“This culture means a lot to me because I like Formula 1 a lot,” she said. “I learned about this because I always watch through my dad, and I’ve seen Monaco a lot and I love it.”
Tamay also feels the culture she represented doesn’t get the attention it could.
“I chose this culture because I found that not a lot of people know about it,” Tamay said. “So I thought to try something new.”
Another student, Ariel Merone, chose to do her project on Japan because of her own personal interest in the culture.
“I like Japanese, so I decided to take it,” Merone said. “It’s my dream vacation. My favorite thing is the movies and also the people are pretty kind.”
Whatever culture they chose, Visconti gave the students ample instruction on how to create their boards. They had just a week to finish the project.
“I gave them a rubric, a whole schematic, a step-by-step process,” Visconti explained. “I gave them samples. We looked at other schools, what other multicultural nights look like.”
Visconti said she is proud of the work the students did and that she knew they would represent these cultures well.
“We were just trying to highlight the different cultures in the building,” Visconti said, “so we thought we could represent everyone well, share, and we could all learn from each other.”
