Prompt 4 -- Johnson

Everyone has his or her own personal history and everyone’s history is different. People live in different communities and are part of different groups which lead to different experiences. This is true in my tutoring classroom. Although I am from a white, middle class town, my students and I have many things in common. For one thing, I went to public school in the same district as these children for two years. Because of this, I understand how it is difficult to go to school in an inner city school where you don’t get everything other students get. This was made more obvious to me when I moved to the town I live in now. My new school had better books, desks, supplies, and computers in every classroom, while my old school was struggling to find paper to do simple classroom assignments. This would definitely give me an advantage to teaching this classroom because I know how difficult it is for the city kids to learn under these conditions. I know where the kids are coming from and I would definitely be able to connect and sympathize with the kids. Because I did go to these schools when I was younger, going into this tutoring experience I cannot think of any misconceptions I had of various groups. I went to school and was friends with many people who are of similar backgrounds. I think this gave me a huge advantage because I had already been in similar classes and knew what to expect.

I can relate this prompt to Allan Johnson’s works. In his article, “Our House is on Fire,” Johnson discusses white privilege. The article explains that white privilege is everywhere, especially in our schools. Students in “white” towns have better books, supplies and teachers. Students in inner city schools get very little basic supplies. This creates a major inequality in our school systems with the white getting more powerful, and the poor getting less powerful.

This relates to this prompt because in the school I tutor, there are very little basic supplies. All the posters are hand written on large poster paper. In schools I went to when I was younger, posters were bought with everything neatly typed up. This makes white privilege very prominent to me. It shows that poor schools are not getting the supplies they need, while white schools are getting much more. This will be a major challenge to me if I am a teacher in a school like my tutoring assignment. I will need to try to figure out how to manage with the inequalities and try to break the reign of white privilege.

Prompt 3-- Brown

In the school that I tutor in, there is a variety of different socio-cultural and ethnic needs. Some of my students are Hispanic or Asian, while others are African American or white. Most of my students come from working class families, with many of them at or below the poverty line. Because of this, it is difficult to address the needs of all the children in the classroom because their needs are so different from one another. However, I have seen some good ways to try to help the students, even if the do have different needs.

While I was tutoring, my teacher gave the students their weekly spelling test. Many of my students are Hispanic and speak fluent Spanish, so I was curious to see if the teacher would make any adjustments to meet their needs. When I was in school, my spelling tests would consist of the teacher saying the word and giving the word in a sentence. This was not the case in this classroom. To start, the teacher said, "What letter makes the ‘oooo’ sound?" the students said the sound aloud and then wrote the letter on their paper. Then she started testing with actual words, "The first word is hand, sound out the word hand." The students did so together and wrote the word on their papers. This is how she conducted the rest of the test. I was amazed at the way she did give the test because I have never seen a spelling test given this way. I believe this is and excellent way to help all the students pass their test because it is teaching them about the sounds the letters make so they can learn to spell. This will also help the students who have English as a second language, because they are learning how the letters and sound relate in English. I believe this is addressing the needs of all the students.

This prompt can also relate to Lyn Mikel Brown’s article “In the Bad or Good of Girlhood.” In this article, Brown compares the experiences of girls in a working class city, with girls in an upper/middle class city. She describes the “metonymic fallacy,” which is the assumption that the middle class woman’s experience is the same for all women regardless of socio-cultural or ethnic background. The article then goes on to describe how the working class girls have a much different experience than the middle class girls. The working class girls live in a culture where they feel as if they need to prove themselves to each other and really compete for the teacher’s attention. They also feel as if they need to fight for the things they want or need.

In my classroom, almost all of the children are working class and are either at or below the poverty line. If I were the teacher of this classroom, I will have to take into consider the fact that the children in this class are not middle class like I am. Their experiences will be vastly different then my own were, and I cannot assume that all the girls go through the same experiences just because they are girls. What I may see as “acting out” might really be how the child was brought up in their culture. I have seen this in my tutoring. My teacher holds the middle class ideals in her mind, while the students, who are not middle class, do not. There is a major miscommunication between the teacher and students because both grew up in different groups. It as Brown stated, “The teachers seem unpredictable and irrational, in part because the girls come to school with different conceptions of the relationships among gender, knowledge, and power and because the signs and codes of the culture of power had never been clearly stated or explained to them.” As a teacher, I will have to take these differences in cultures and try to help my children ease into the culture of power, but also try to get them to speak up for themselves and try to get them to change things for the better.

Prompt 2 --Goldenberg

As I entered my classroom, the students in my assigned class surprised me. As I looked around at the students, I only saw one white student and one Asian student. The rest were African American, or so I thought. As I started working with the kids and playing their favorite game (Candy Land, but with a reading twist) I realized many of them were actually Hispanic. I should have expected this as many of the signs in the front of the building are in both Spanish and English, but judging by looks alone, it didn’t seem like it. According to the Infoworks website, 54% of the students at my school are Hispanic and 28% are African American. Only 18% of the students are white or Asian. Out of all those students, only 23% receive ESL education.

I was very surprised to see that only 23 % of the students at my school receive ESL services. This surprised me because while I was playing the games with my students, one of the students, John, got distracted and wasn’t paying attention until one of the other students, Bob, started speaking to him in Spanish. Knowing a bit of Spanish, I could understand that Bob had told John something along the lines of “sit down and play the game.” After he went back to sitting down and playing the game with myself and Bob. As he moved the spaces on the board, I could hear him mumbling in Spanish. “uno, dos, tres” This event made me wonder why more of my students do not receive ESL services.

This experience relates to Claude Goldenberg. In his article “Teaching English Language Learners,” Goldenberg discusses how we as teachers should help ELL’s (English Language Learners) learn English and their other subjects as well. He states that we should teach the children in their primary language, then help them transfer what they already know in their first language to things they are learning in English. He also states that we shouldn’t only focus on teaching English and reading, but teach other subjects again.

At my school, very few of the children receive ESL or ELL services. The example with the two boys I previously wrote about shows how much these services are need in these schools. These children are having a difficult time learning to read and it is probably because they don’t understand what is being said in the class. This puts them behind in the classroom and then on state testing. This school should be using more ELL techniques in the school. This would definitely help this school raise the test scores and help these children in the future.