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.