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.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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 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.
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