Settling In

Abstract

Several of our interviewees still vividly remembered the shock of the first day in an American school. As one put it, “When my parents sent me to school here, I was dressed in European clothes, short pants, wool stockings and a back pack. This caused quite a commotion.” The newly arrived children, as well as the adult newcomers, experienced various instances and degrees of culture shock, a challenge common to most immigrants who are catapulted into what at first seems a strange and alien culture.¹