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.