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"