Prompt #6 Dewey and Delpit

Last week Ms. King had been absent so when I arrived at the school the secretary told me to go to room 112 instead. When I walked into room 112 the teacher told me there were four students from Ms. King’s class in the back and I’ll be working with them. They were four students that I haven’t worked much with this semester but I was eager to see how they were doing in school. The students were excited to be working with me, that is except for Juan.

I began talking to the students and asking them what subject they were working on. Three students told me it was math while Juan sat back with his arms folded. I told the three students to get started on their assignment while I pulled a chair over and sat down next to Juan. I asked him what was going on and he replied in a heavy accent saying “I don’t like math.” I told him that just because we didn’t like a subject it doesn’t mean we don’t have to do it and I handed him a pencil and asked him to get started. However, he just put the pencil down and sat there staring blankly at the paper. Pablo then told me that Ms. King usually works with Juan one on one for math because he has trouble reading the directions because he speaks Spanish.

I wasn’t sure what to do, seeing as how I don’t speak or understand Spanish. I once again pulled a chair up alongside of Juan and sat down next to him. I began reading the directions slowly to Juan while I used my finger to underline the words as I said them. He began to lean forward and look on with me as I explained that it was addition and subtraction with two digit numbers. He began to grin and I could tell he could understand what I was saying but I continued by showing him how to do one of the problems. I pointed to the first problem on the sheet, 11+21. I told him that we have to start by adding the first two digits, 1 and 1. I then held up one finger on my left and hand and one finger on my right hand and asked him to put up how many fingers total. He raised his hand and put up two fingers and wrote it in the box. Next I put up two fingers on my left hand and one on my right and without asking Juan put up three fingers. He wrote the three in the box and began to smile. I told him he did a great job and to call me over if he needed any help.

This relates both to Dewey and to Delpit. I believe it relates to Dewey in the sense that he says education is a social function and that we learn from our differences. I believe it was in a way social because had a student not told me about Juan’s problem I would have just assumed he didn’t want to do the work. I also learned from our differences and I now know that I shouldn’t assume that a student doesn’t want to do the work but that he may not understand the work and be afraid to admit it. This also relates to Delpit through her aspects of power. It very strongly relates to aspect four, being told explicitly the rules allows acquiring power easier. Had I not explicitly told Juan the rules he wouldn’t have been able to acquire any power at all.

Prompt #5 Delpit

As culturally competent teachers we must both involve and work with the parents and community from which our students come from. As I have noticed, after many visits to the school, a child’s development in the classroom has a lot to do with what goes on at home with their parents.

The student that I tutor, for example, was talking to me the other day and mentioned that she was so tired. When I asked why she told me she was playing her Nintendo DS until 1 in the morning. I then asked her if her mom or dad got mad at her for staying up so late; which she replied to by telling me they don’t care and that she doesn’t have a bed time. For a second grader I think going to bed at 1 in the morning not only takes away from her time sleeping, it also has an impact on her presence in the classroom the next morning.

One major problem that we as teachers may run into is parents that simply don’t care about their child’s education. I personally have witnessed this problem on two separate occasions with the same student. The first time was as mentioned above and the second time was when Brandy was very sick but still went to school. She said she had both a headache and a stomach ache and it was clearly affecting her in the classroom because whenever Ms. King told her to get to work she would complain about either her head or her stomach. Finally, Ms. King decided to call Brandy’s mom and let her know what was going on and ask her to come pick up Brandy but she simply said “She’s fine, she’s probably just being lazy.” Ms. King attempted to continue talking on the phone but was stopped midsentence when Brandy’s mom hung up the phone.

I feel that the connection between teacher and parent just isn’t there, not because of Ms. King but because the parent simply doesn’t want to get involved. This reminded me strongly of Lisa Delpit because in her article “Silenced Dialogue” she talks about how one of the most important connections is between parent and teacher. This worries me because Brandy’s mom has the attitude that “as the teacher you should be able to help them while I sit back and watch.” However, this clearly isn’t the case, as Delpit says it’s a combination of both the parents and the teacher.

This is quite a difficult challenge address seeing as how the parent doesn’t see it to be a problem. One way that I as a teacher could address this issue is to attempt to speak to another guardian (older sibling, father etc.) of Brandy’s that may care a bit more and try to put education higher on Brandy’s list of things to do. Perhaps, this way the student won’t be going from a classroom where education is a priority to the home where education is an option.

Prompt #4 Johnson

Having come from a different part of the state, coming to this school was rather a culture shock for me. As I’ve said in previous posts the elementary school I went to growing up was pretty much a segregated school in that we had no more than a handful of non white students. Seeing as my elementary school was predominantly white the school never ran into a problem such as students speaking different languages.

While tutoring at this school I have noticed that as the prompt says “no one enters a classroom without a personal history.” At the school in which I tutor at it seems that the primary language of most of the students is Spanish. I feel that this is where my personal history and their personal history could intersect. When I think of the word intersect, what comes to mind is two things meeting at a certain point and I believe that I could meet the students half way and we could help each other to better understand our personal histories and languages. This would not only improve the relationship from teacher to student but it would make learning for the students much easier. If I share my knowledge of the English language with them and they share their knowledge of the Spanish language with me I don’t think there will be a cultural barrier that we couldn’t break down together.

However, some students may not be willing to cooperate and this could face me with a challenge. I am the only white person in the classroom I teach in, so not only was it a surprise for me to see no white students in the classroom; I’m sure it was a surprise for the students to see a white teacher in the classroom. One of the challenges that I have faced in the classroom is when trying to talk to a student who was upset about something that happened outside of school he said “you’ll never know what it’s like at my house!” Once he said that, I didn’t know what else to say. The student was completely right, after growing up in a different setting as these students I don’t know what it’s like coming from the kind of household these students come from.

The biggest misconception that I faced coming to this school as a Reading Buddy was I didn’t think the students would be able to read well at all. I thought I would be teaching them the bulk of their reading knowledge, but I was way off. The student that I tutor one on one struggles quite a bit with reading but is not as bad as I expected.

I think that this prompt directly relates to Alan Johnson because he states that race is still an issue in this country and that schools are still not diverse. At this particular school I can clearly see that the school is not diverse and that race is an issue. If I were an African American student I don’t think the student I was talking with would have told me that I didn’t know what it was like at his house. I think that we must all come together and do as Johnson says and “celebrate our differences” rather than use them against each other.

Prompt #3 Shor

When we as teachers are assessing or evaluating the student’s progress towards their goal we must keep in mind that not every student is the same. In order to properly evaluate them we must keep a few things in mind including the student’s sociocultural characteristics, linguistics, and ethnic background. For instance, if a student is an English Language Learner you cannot expect that student to perform as well as a student whose primary language is English. However, some teachers choose to ignore this fact and simply say that the child is not performing as well as others.

Ms. King is not one of those teachers that ignore the student’s background. When I first went to the classrooms library with Brandy to choose a book to read I quickly noticed the variety of books. There were many baskets full of books and they all had a letter on the front of them. These letters ranged from A-P and as the letter got higher so did the reading difficulty. After Brandy chose her L book we went to read it at a nearby table. Upon sitting at the table I couldn’t help but notice another basket behind Ms. King’s desk; this basket said “ELL” on it.

Later in the day, when the students were using the bathroom, I asked Ms. King what exactly the ELL books contained. She was telling me that there were a couple of students in the classroom that were still struggling quite a bit with English and there were several different ELL books she had. She went on to tell me about some of them, saying the math book just breaks down how to read and interpret the math textbooks and the vocabulary book is just some basic vocabulary words spelled out in both Spanish and English. I was both surprised and happy to see that Ms. King didn’t just let the English Language Learners fall behind in class but, she took the time to sit down with them individually and help them progress toward their goal.

A theorist that I thought of after leaving the school that day was Ira Shor. In Ira Shor’s article Empowering Education he says that a critical-democratic pedagogy is a student-centered program for multicultural democracy in school and society. He goes on to say that “the goals of this pedagogy are to relate personal growth to public life by developing strong skills, academic knowledge, habits of inquiry, and critical curiosity about society, power, inequality, and change.” I feel that a student that is an ELL is directly relating their personal growth to public life because as their knowledge of the English language grows so does their public life. I believe Shor would be quite impressed if he came into Ms. King’s classroom and watched the ELL students learning. Not only are they improving their academic knowledge but they are also posing many questions and doing all that they can to learn as much as possible.

Prompt #2 Goldenberg

The linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics of the students in the classroom I’m tutoring in, although they are as I expected, are quite different then the way my elementary school was. I grew up in a small town in Rhode Island where the population at my high school was 96% white and you could count the African American students on one hand. This school is the exact opposite, the white population here is 4%, Hispanic population is 66%, African American population is 23%, and the Asian population is 8%. I also noticed another big difference about this school, a lot of the students, 43%, use English as their second language. Of course, the students who were struggling to speak, read, and write in English were the students that were behind everyone else in the class.

After a few visits to the school and seeing the data on Infoworks I thought of Claude Goldenberg. Goldenberg puts emphasis on teaching students in their native languages, in this situation Spanish. However, in the classroom I tutor in it seems as though Ms. King only speaks Spanish to her students when she’s angry and is ordering them to behave.

One thing they could do to help this problem, which doesn’t seem to be going away on its own, is to hire more Spanish speaking teachers. Seeing as how they take students out of the classroom throughout the day I think an improvement would be to take the students that speak English as a second language out of the room to go with a tutor who is bilingual in both Spanish and English. In doing this, I think it will improve the students English as well as their academic studies.

Another thing that Claude Goldenberg talks about is how the standards that are set are sometimes overwhelming for both the students and the teachers. When I walk around the class as the students are writing in the journals I can’t help but notice the ESL students misspelling nearly every word. I usually try to correct them and pull up a chair to help them but Ms. King tells me “there’s no use, they aren’t going to learn it anyway. Leaving my classroom after every visit I can clearly see what Goldenberg is talking about and how the students are overwhelmed.

My last visit I saw a perfect example of how students bring cultural capital into the classroom. It wasn’t something too big but while reading a book with, Brandy the student I tutor, I noticed the way she said “this” or “that.” When she would speak it was “dis” or “dat.” I try correcting her when she says it but it doesn’t seem to be working. I wasn’t sure if I should continue to try until last week when I visit and she said “I’m gonna say it dis way cause dat’s how my mom taught me.” My teacher also came up to me after class and reassured me that there was no changing the way they say some of their words because that is how they were brought up speaking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU

This is a video of slam poet Taylor Mali talking about "What teachers make"

Prompt #1

The neighborhood in which my school is located is rather confusing. On my way to the school I drive through a very urban part of the city where all the buildings are very close to each other and you can almost always hear someone’s stereo turned a few notches too high. However, when I turn onto the street the school is located on there are all beautiful two story homes and it’s very quiet. After parking in the rather small parking lot I had to walk a little ways to get to the main entrance of the school.

When I got to the front doors I couldn’t help but notice two signs, one in English and one in Spanish, telling me to ring the bell on the left to enter. There was a voice that told me to check it to the main office. Once I did that I walked through the rather colorful hallways to my classroom located at the very end of the hall. I was pleasantly surprised by all the smiles when I walked into the classroom. Ms. King announced to the class, which consisted of primarily Spanish and African American students, that I would be here every Wednesday for the next few months and all the students smiled, which made me smile.

The classroom was very large and gave the students plenty of room to do what they needed to. There were six large tables that each seated four students. There were also different stations for the students to do their “centers” such as a small library for silent reading, a reading rug for read alouds, a globe and a map for history, and they used the tables they sit at for the writing center. In the corner of the room there was a small teacher’s desk which was primarily used for storage because Ms. King is never sitting at it. Overall the school and classroom were very welcoming and comfortable to me.

I quickly found out what was valued in this school and classroom, respect. It was very rare for me to see any disrespect but when a student disrespected anyone Ms. King was there to keep them in check. Another thing that is valued in this classroom is responsibility. Every day the students got to choose their own centers to go to but, they were responsible for evenly distributing their time among all centers and completing all the work that needed to be done.

The students were sad to see me leaving but it was a great start to my tutoring program and I can’t wait to continue.