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.
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I had a nearly identical experience with my school and my students. I'm also from a small town, and grew up in a non-diverse area, and the shock I felt upon being thrust into a suddenly diverse school system, even if just for a short time, was intensely intimidating. But thankfully, I got over it pretty quick, haha.
ReplyDeleteMy students also asked me questions about my hometown and how I grew up. No one asked in I had a pool, but they did ask about pets, and when I told them we had dogs, cats, and rabbits, they were all shocked! In the city, space is limited, so I know animals are not often owned in such large numbers. They were even more amazed when I told them of my best friend who's father owned horses in their own backyards.
Though, the materials in the classroom I tutored in were not outdated. My teacher made many of the supplies in her own free time to supplement the supplies given by the school. She worked hard to empower her student's education, as Ira Shor advocates. My teacher also strove to find new ways of presenting the information to prevent any of her students from losing interest in the lesson and she gave them endless support.