And he taught utilizing empowering education happily ever after....

Prompt 7:
Overall, my VIPs experience has been an experience that I will reflect on for my entire teaching career as the starting point of a journey. This journey is not only a journey about teaching, but it is equally about learning. I will never stop learning about new information, improved teaching methods, learning about other cultures than my own, the list is endless. FNED and my experience in my VIPS classroom have taught me immense amounts of knowledge that I will undoubtedly utilize within my classroom when I am a teacher.
There were several technical techniques that I learned while spending time in my VIPS classroom that I will undoubtedly utilize when I have a classroom of my own. These skills include how to accommodate for students who are having trouble with a certain subject while not getting frustrated. Another skill was how to maintain your composure when a student loses his cool. I learned this skill when one of the third graders in the classroom suddenly got extremely with the teacher, yelled, threw things, and even flipped his desk. The teacher’s response surprised me at first as she calmly maintained her composure but quickly sent the particular student to the principal’s office. I am glad that I got to observe the response of my teacher to a problem that disrupted the classroom so that I am more prepared if my own classroom every has a similar issue.
One of the key elements of my experience that I am especially glad I encountered was the opportunity to teach a group of students very different from the classes where I had been educated. As I have said in previous blogs, I was raised in the rural town of Burrillville. With a student population that is over 95 percent white, Burrillville has never been known for its diversity. My father had been an Columbian-American immigrant himself, and when I was raised, although I did not get exposed to diversity in my classroom, outside of class I had been raised to be accepting of all races.
Despite my prior exposure to different races, I had never considered the advantages that I have had growing up. For years, African-Americans have been marginalized in our culture. In a writing by Allan Johnson titled, “Our House is on Fire,” Johnson addresses the face that there are no inherit problems with differences among people. The problem in society today is that sections of society are established to attribute certain advantages to these differences, and this has created an oppressive system of privilege. Johnson references how whites dominate political groups, statistically make more money and have a higher life expectancy. The statistic that I found to be most astounding was that one out of every eight African-American males is currently in prison, and an estimated 28% of African-American males will spend time behind bars. Another statistic was that although 85 percent of drug users are white, the majority of prisoners in jail for drug-related incidents are people of color.
With such astounding statistics, it is our social responsibility as people to rectify these issues. As educators, it is not only our responsibility, but it should be our primary initiative to generate a society who grows up to be aware of the issues of the past, but willing to accept all people for who they are, regardless of their differences.

Level 5: Parents and Pedagogs

Prompt 5:
As I continue on through my VIPS experience, I look at the students in the classroom and I consider their background. In the environment that I was raised in, I have little in common with the diverse bounty of students in the classroom. But with every student, there is some sort of parental involvement. In terms of parental situations, I started to consider issues that I would have.
The first problem was a reflection of statistics of the region of providence. According to a report published by Kids Count in April, 2009, Providence faces certain statistics that puts parents at a disadvantage when interacting with their student’s teachers. The first statistic that made me consider the situations of students was that 51% of children live in a single-parent family. If a parent has to single handedly raise a child, it can often be difficult to communicate with a teacher to monitor their child’s progression. Another statistic was that 40.5% of children live below the federal poverty threshold. With such a large percentage of students living in poverty, parents need to work harder to provide for their children, and due to this, are unable to spend as much time monitoring students progression. As a teacher, the solution that I saw for this problem was to go out of my way as a teacher to let each parent know how their student is doing. Whether it is leaving a message, sending home a letter, or making a phone call, it is critical for the parent to know and support how their child is doing, and if the situation at home makes this difficult, then it is essential to do all that you can to rectify this situation as best as possible.
Another problem that I would anticipate is the diverse cultures that parents would expect their students to learn about. It would be extremely important to promote the work of Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, among other groups. Even despite the young age of the students, parents appreciate observing the incorporation of their own culture into a curriculum. This reminded me of an article by Ira Shor, titled Empowering Education. It is within this article where Shor promotes education as a tool for social change, a place that students can be trained as critical thinkers, skilled workers and active citizens. One crucial element of education is to make sure that the material that you are teaching your students is relevant to them. One effective method of empowering education was the implementation of problem-posing, the utilization of applying classroom lessons to problems in their own lives. Culture relevance is also extremely essential to take into consideration. Parents in a classroom that primarily consists of minorities do not want their students taught by a curriculum that reinforces the dominant ideology. In his work, Ira Shor acknowledges that curriculum is one place where the dominant culture can be supported or challenged, depending on the way knowledge is presented. It is the responsibility of myself as a teacher to not only include the voices of marginalized groups, but to make them prominent for the students to see intertwined throughout the curriculum.

Shaping the Future by Observing the Past.

Prompt Four:
I grew up in the small town of Burrillville, RI. Anybody who has ever been to Burrillville can attest that this town is probably as rural an area as you can find in New England. The town is complete with campgrounds, lakes, parks, and woods. Everywhere. It was the talk of the town when we obtained our first fast food chain a few years ago, a Subway in the center of town. As for the people, the sociocultural aspect of my hometown is not very diverse, to say the least. According to infoworks, the schools in the town of Burrillville are approximately 97% white.
To say that I do not have a bias when entering this classroom would be an extremely ignorant statement. I have been sheltered by my tiny little town all my life, and now it is time for me to get exposed to the world.
In the last several visits, in between assignments, the students ask where I am from, they ask where I am from. I explain my small little town. The questions that ensued made me smile. "Do you have pools?" Yes, we have pools. "How do people get to school?" The school bus. "Are the people nice?" Very nice.
All of the children within my classroom live in providence, an urban area, and the idea of growing up in such a rural area intrigued them.
The students I talked to did not discuss race. The school I am tutoring in has a very different demographic, 35 percent white, 33 percent Hispanic and 26 percent African-American.
The difference in demographic started to make me consider Jonathan Kozol’s work, Still Separate, Still Unequal. In this work, Kozol references the financial advantages of the education of white children versus the education of minorities. The poor inner city schools that provide education for minorities receive less funding than schools in the same regions that teach white children. Within Kozol’s work, he quotes the statement, “There are expensive children, and there are cheap children.” I started to consider if this was true, and if I myself had been given opportunities within a classroom that others had not. I grew up in a primarily white school in a rural region within 20 miles of my VIPS school. Although the differences were not astounding, they were still apparent. The class sizes in my VIPS school were much larger. While I recalled in elementary school having class sizes of roughly 20 to 25 children, the three classes at my VIPS school all consist of about thirty students each. Despite this excess of students, the area of this classroom actually seems smaller than the classroom that I had remembered getting taught in. Materials within the classroom in the VIPS school were also seemingly outdated. The subject of elementary math may rarely change, but I feel it is still conducive to invest in new books.
Although it is a limited experience, my experience in my Providence classroom has made me question the dynamics of power invested in different schools.

Following the Path to Success.

Prompt Three:
The first accommodation that I saw by my teacher was the decision to place students at certain levels. How do you determine where to draw the line between a high achieving student and a low achievement student? The more I think about it, I don't know if I could personally do it. In the third grade class that I am a tutor in, while I am there, the teacher hands out homework. She has two different copies that she hands out within a classroom, the easier version and the more difficult homework.
Although I have heard of homogeneous classes before, I have never heard of heterogeneous classes with homogeneous homeworks. This technique seemed somewhat outlandish because within the class period, the students learn the same assignment. If the students were at different levels of topics, it would make sense to have different assignments. But the differences between the homework is the same topic, different levels of difficulty. With a singularity of material, the only difference from student to student is ability to comprehend the assignment. The student with a low comprehension of the assignment may have this disadvantage for several reasons. The student may not be paying close attention during a class period. The student may not respond to the explanation of the material as well due to their sociocultural standpoint. The student may not have the ability to spend as much time on their homework at home. Finally, certain students may have the ability to utilize their parents for assistance on their homework while others do not have the same luxury.

The second instance of responsiveness to sociocultural standing was something that happened to me while I was tutoring. During one of my tutoring sessions, I had the privilege of tutoring on the Thursday before Halloween. Although halloween was on a saturday, and they still had another day left of school, the excitement of the day to come had filled the classroom. The issue within the classroom is harnessing the energy from this lesson in order to continue with the math objective of the day. After my group of students had finished their assignment, they started to talk about their plans for halloween. One boy said he was going to be a professional football player, another was going to have a Scream costume, complete with blood that actually ran down the front of the mask. While these students were enthusiastically explaining the intricacies of their costumes, I noticed one student, normally talkative, had fallen silent. The other students finished talking about their costumes and then the three of them all turned and asked what he was going to be. Shrugging, he tried to play it off as if he did not know. It was apparent to me that he did not have a costume and he was uncomfortable that all the other students had something he did not. I immediately stepped in and brought up the fact that I myself did not have a costume. This instance was the first instance that I had encountered where it was aparent that a student that may have an economic disadvantage compared the other students. As a teacher, it is vital that you try to minimize the difference between students so that way certain students do not feel more privileged than others. If students do not feel comfortable with their economic standpoint, it inhibits their ability to learn within a classroom, and as teachers, one of our responsibilities is to ensure comfortability of all students.

The Start of my Path.

As eager and nervous as I could possibly be, I entered the room, unknowing of what would be through the door of that elementary school classroom where I would be spending my volunteering experience as a math tutor. When I entered, the teacher had already assembled all of her students to sit in a corner of the room on a rectangular rug, writing on a large notepad. As I entered, all of the students turned to look at me, some looking apprehensive, some smiling and some others just curious to see who the visitor was. I smiled back, having forgotten how small that I was when I was their age. The teacher invited me to sit down and make myself comfortable and motioned toward a miniature table on the side of the classroom. I knew then that my adventure had begun.

After I sat down at the small table, she continued to write on the notepad, teaching the class the lesson with all of the students sitting in close proximity to each other on the rug. It was then when I got to observe the mannerisms of the students as well as evaluate the teaching methods that were utilized within the classroom. Having all her students sit on the rug creates a sense of unity as well as the ability to get all of the students very close to her and to the information being taught. Students with large amounts of enthusiasm to answer a problem can influence those who may be less likely to answer a problem. Due to rotating classes, I was able to tutor three different sessions of students. For two of the classes, teaching on the carpet was an effective way to manage the classroom, although for one of the classes it got to be an issue. At the beginning of the lesson, one or two of the students were misbehaving, bothering other students by poking them or whispering to students who were otherwise paying attention. The teacher, noticing these distractions, quickly put a stop to them, silencing them with various different methods. Whether it was simply calling their name with a stern voice, telling the students that she expected better from them, or staring the student down until they stopped, it usually stopped the student's disruptions. The problem that I observed was that whenever the teacher stopped to quiet one of the students, several other students would visibly lose focus in the assignment. I am interested to see if for this one particular class if the teacher utilizes the same method of bringing them together to the rug, or if she deviates from her normal method.

For the second half of each session, the teacher assigned a problem for the students to complete. In each class, four students circled around my table with their assignment, while the rest of the class worked in pairs. The first class was the hardest because I was trying to figure out what method would be best to teach all of the students. It was difficult because we were on limited time and I had to make sure that all four of the students understood the work they were doing. At first, I would pose a question to the group, and there was usually one or 2 hands that would consistently go up immediately, one hand that would go up sporadically, and one hand that would rarely go up. The most important thing in a math classroom is not the answer itself, but the process that was used to obtain the answer. I wanted to ensure that all four of the students had a firm understanding of the problem. To do this, I went from one end of the circle down the line, asking each student what they thought the next step would be. In all three classes, this method seemed to be the most effective.

Probably the most rewarding part of my first week was after one of the sessions, we had a few minutes remaining and I was talking my group of four boys. They all informed me on how they were football players. In a matter of minutes, they informed me of their positions, their amazing team, their favorite professional players, and how they were going to beat the other students teams. Class was nearly over and three of the boys started to pack up, but one of the boys in my group, who had been struggling at the beginning of class, asked me to write another problem for him to do (for his own enjoyment!). I smiled and quickly assembled a similar problem to the one that we had done in class, making sure that I incorperated three of his favorite football problems into the problem. He smiled, and I watched as he started the problem in his notebook as he returned to his seat.

Overall, week one was a great experience for me, and I look forward to more positive experiences within the classroom as the weeks go on. With only one week behind me, I feel like I have learned a lot about student behavior as well as teaching, and I can only wait to see what the future weeks have in store.

Introduction

Hi! My name is Luke Diez. I am a secondary education math major. I come from the small town of Burrillville, RI. This is my second year as a RIC student and its going really well. In my spare time, I like to spend my time golfing, making videos, playing basketball and coaching basketball.