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.