Every Friday morning at around 9am you can find me in a third grade classroom that is “as colorful as a box of crayons” helping one of two students with their reading fluency.
The school I visit is located in one of the nicer parts of the city and is less than a mile from RIC. The building itself is a giant, older brick building with the name of the school written on the side in block letters that are beginning to fade and become less noticeable as time goes on.
I was surprised to notice that the school does not have a playground and barely any grass. A blacktop in the back of the school serves both as a parking lot and a place for recess.
The inside of the school is by far friendlier looking than the outside. Every wall and bulletin board is covered with either students art work or motivational posters and sayings, each one of them showcasing diversity in some aspect. The main office is a little difficult to find on your first trip there, hidden behind a staircase and around a corner, but one little piece of paper can point you in the right direction if you are paying attention.
Inside the classroom I volunteer in, S P A C E is valued. With originally 26 students in the classroom, any extra space is extremely valuable and can’t be wasted. Bookcases and shelves line the walls while easel pads are hung up on the windows and the 3 computer desks in the back of the room don’t have chairs. Another way that the school helped add space to the classrooms was to provide each classroom with their own coat closet for the students to hang up their coats and backpacks and keep the classroom less cluttered and more open.
Working and learning together is something that is also valued. With all of the desks set up into groups scattered throughout the middle of the classroom, the teacher wants her students to work together and learn from their peers. And even though all of the group work is looked highly upon, excess socializing is highly frowned upon. And seeing that it is almost April, the students have learned already that they will be in trouble if they are caught talking to their buddy when the teacher is talking, which leads into the next value of the classroom, authority.
The teacher has the first and final say in everything. In her classroom, it’s either her way or the highway, which, in this case, would be the principal’s office. She doesn’t tolerate any rowdy or idiotic behavior from the students. And each student knows their place or will be put back into their place.
One day, after the teacher had brought her class to gym, she came back and talked to me and another RIC student I volunteer with about the way she runs her classroom. She told us that she’s been teaching for 28 years throughout the city and she has to teach this way in this school because it’s the only way to get through to some of her students. They grow up in different family situations then we probably did, usually ones where there’s not much structure or guidance and the kids can get away with a lot. But she won’t tolerate that in her classroom. She’s teaching them to behave and respect their superior and educator and for the most part, it seems to be working for her.
One other thing valued in the third grade classroom is their routine. Every morning promptly at 9:15am the teacher sharpens her students’ pencils so they won’t be getting up during any of her teaching time to sharpen a pencil. Then, at 9:40a, after all of their morning work is completed, the students march in two single-filed lines down to the end of the hallway and they all go to the bathroom, with 3 students being dent in at a time. They have 5 minutes total for all of them to be finished and back in line and then every student gets $1 of the school’s fake money. This is really all I get to see, only being in the classroom from 9-10:30 and the class leaves for gym at 10:05 on Fridays, but I can only imagine how the rest of the day and week plays out.
One last thing that this elementary school values is making their students earn their privileges. They have this fake money system set up where in any situation a student does something “good,” then they are rewarded with $1 of this fake cash. This system is school wide and affects every classroom. I personally don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the kids earning their rewards, but just the way the school went about it troubles me. I feel that it is just rewarding their students for something that they should be doing, like walking down the hall quietly or handing in their homework. Yes, they are only in elementary school, but I feel that it could hurt them when they move on to middle school and a whole new environment where they won’t be rewarded for doing something the teacher asked them to do. The teacher I work with even referred to the money yesterday as bribery for the students and I have to fully agree with her.
All in all, I honestly look forward to going in on Fridays to work with my two “reading buddies” because they have such a positive outlook on everything and I can’t help but to smile along with them. No matter what is going on outside that classroom, these students feel safe and happy and it is completely infectious. They are still innocent, but you can see that it won’t stay with them much longer. They are growing up in a different time than us and are more aware of the troubles surrounding them but I like to think that by what we are all doing for 90 minutes once every week, we’re making a difference in their lives. Maybe we are just helping them to read better so they can go on and succeed in the world or maybe we’re all doing a little something more.
I hope you all have great rest of the weekend and get to enjoy this amazing weather we’re having before it disappears (rain next week) and I’ll see you in class on Monday! =]
