Prompt #4 Brown

4) The culturally competent teacher is aware of the diverse cultural groups represented in his/her classroom, investigates the sociocultural factors that influence student learning, and is able to integrate this knowledge into his/her teaching.
No one enters a classroom without a personal history; thus, no one enters a classroom completely free of bias.
How might your personal history/sociocultural characteristics intersect with those of your students?
What challenges or advantages might you have as a teacher in this classroom?
What misconceptions about various cultural groups have you confronted during this experience?

I honestly can’t wait until I have my own classroom. Of course that dream won’t become a reality for at least another 5 years, but still, that doesn’t mean I won’t stop envisioning it. So, until then, I’ll keep volunteering in classrooms when the opportunity presents it. I’ve been volunteering in classrooms in my town since I was in 7th grade. But of course my town has very little diversity to offer up.

Welcome to Portland, CT, a small town of roughly 8,000 people, give or take. And for the record, that’s about the same amount of people enrolled at RIC. There are 5 schools in the town and I attended 4 of them before I went to the Catholic, all girls high school in the next town over. Each grade in the elementary schools in Portland has 5 classes with 25 students in each. At least 20 of those students in each of the classes are Caucasian. So diversity is lacking.

Volunteering in the classroom this semester has been my first experience working in a Title 1 environment, but not my first with working with inner city students. For that last half of my senior year of high school I volunteered at a youth center once a week helping underprivileged kids with their homework. These experiences have allowed me to see and learn more about a different life style, one that I had little to no true knowledge about before then.

This prompt made me think of Brown more than anything. When I was reading the article “In the Good and Bad of Girlhood,” I found the description of the Acadia girls uncannily similar to what I was like in middle school, and still am, in a way. This got me thinking. I figured that the teacher for the Mansfield girls probably grew up in an environment similar to that of the Arcadia girls and grew up knowing a different way of life and a different idea of what was right and wrong. This is why she couldn’t completely understand what the Mansfield girls were going through. She must have figured that they were just like her when she was that age, which wasn’t true . As Brown points out, that’s what metonymic fallacy is, mistaking one example of a sample of a group and figuring it applies to the whole group.

After figuring that whole scenario out, I was a little freaked out. I was concerned that I would be that teacher jumping to conclusions about my students. But of course, that was before the whole idea of the article had sunk into my brain. I now know that I won’t make that same mistake as that teacher because, for starters, I’m in FNED with Dr. August and this is what she is teaching us to never do, and wonderfully, I may add! ;) But, also, we are learning firsthand in our observation classrooms that each student is an individual and we cannot assume that each one is going through the same things that we did at that age. We do have the same underlying needs and wants, like acceptance and the sense of belonging, but at different extents and measures.

After finally piecing this all together, I feel that it will be difficult and challenging at first to run a classroom filled with students with a different sociocultural background from mine, but overtime it would become less and less of a challenge. I know I won’t be the teacher who tries to forget about where his/her students come from, treating the student’s background as if it were a coat each student could take off in the morning and put back on in the afternoon before leaving for the day. You have to embrace it and work with it in order for the students to succeed. And after a while of working in this setting, learning what to look for and expect, I feel that it will become second nature.

I just want to add one last thing. It’s my favorite line from the Disney Movie Tarzan. It’s not said by one of the characters, but sung by Phil Collins in the middle of the song “Son of Man.”

"In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn."

I guess we just need to remember that this whole process is a learning process, every day of it. And we don’t stop learning even after we graduate. We will someday be a teacher in the front of a classroom, teaching just about everything ranging from multiplication to reading to the culture of power, but there will probably come a day when one of our students teaches us something too.

Prompt #3 Shor

3) The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accommodate sociocultural differences that affect learning. How might the teacher be responsive to the linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics of the students in his or her assessment practices?


According to the Merrian-Webster Dictionary, the first definition of the word RESPOND is to say or write something in reply (to provide an answer). The second definition is to act or do something in reaction to something else (to react). It’s not that bizarre to see that a culturally competent teacher follows the second definition.


Culturally competent teachers embody just about everything we are trying to become. They understand that no two students are the same. Every single student that passes through the doors of a teacher’s classroom is a unique and special student that is completely different from the next. Just like we already stated in class multiple times, not all students learn the same way and not all students come from the same place. As teachers, we need to make adjustments to our ways of teaching to help our students grow as much as possible. We need to grasp the fact that we can’t teach the same way every year to different classes and different students. Of course we can teach the same material; just the way we present it and carry through the lesson will have to vary depending on our students.


Another concept that culturally competent teachers understand is that, yes, they are there to teach their students the material to move onto the next grade, but that they are also there to empower the students and make them question the way things are. Critical pedagogy is just that, opening up a student’s mind and allowing them to question everything that is being taught to them. Ira Shor spent a good 45 pages writing about the importance of an empowering education and how much good it can do for students and society. “The teacher brings lesson plans, learning methods, personal experience, and academic knowledge to class but negotiates the curriculum with the students and begins with their language, themes, and understandings.” This all creates “openness in a class where the student’s input jointly creates the learning process,” (Shor, 16). The end result is a democratic system that the students and the teacher are all satisfied with and leads to not only a successful year, but the knowledge that even students can make a difference and are allowed to question anything.


There isn’t much compromise going on in the classroom I tutor in. Granted, I don’t get to see much, if any, of the teacher’s actual teaching lessons on the count that the kids are only in the classroom for an hour in the morning before they get sent off to gym class. During that hour I am always working with two students as their reading buddy out in the hallway, away from all of the classroom action. I hear an occasional raised voice drifting around the classroom, but other than that, I can honestly say that I have no clue as to how the teacher runs her classroom and accommodates for each and every one of her students. I truly wish I did, but there’s not much I can do about it now but just imagine that the teacher DOES adjust her teaching methods for each and every one of her students [even though I know that she has mentally checked out already. I have heard her say on more than one occasion that she can’t wait to retire and that the paycheck isn’t even worth it anymore.] . I do know that she runs her classroom very strictly and very meticulously. Everything is planned out: when to sharpen your pencil, when to go to the bathroom, when it is okay to free read, etc. So, from that, I can guess that not much input is coming from the students’ side of the equation. Even as I said in the last post, the teacher doesn’t even truly know how many students have parents that speak Spanish and if they do or not. I have a feeling that she teaches her way and anything she feels that is not crucial, then she does not want to know.


Don’t get me wrong, she is a lovely woman who has been teaching for 28 years and her students come across as very bright kids, I just really wish I could spend more time in the classroom observing what is actually occurring. There are so many different possibilities as to how to involve all of the wonderful and diverse ethnic and sociocultural characteristics that these students offer, I just wish I had more time to spend with them, instead of knowing that I really only have 2 visits left.

Hope everyone else's volunteering is going great!! Until next time, ttfn =]

Prompt #2 Johnson

For prompt # 2, we are asked to describe the linguistic, ethnic and sociocultural characteristics of the students in the classroom in which we are tutoring. The classroom that I volunteer in has a total of 24 students in it. Only three of the students are Caucasian while the remaining 21 students are either Hispanic or African American. When I am in the classroom, English is the only language I hear. I asked the teacher if there were any bilingual students in her classroom and she said that there might be five. She wasn’t completely sure, but she also said that when she passes out handouts to go home to parents, only 5 of her students raise their hands to receive the handout in Spanish. I was originally shocked that the number was so low because after reading other FNED blogs about how truly diverse their classrooms are, I figured that this classroom would be, too. But, after looking at the Infoworks cite and finding the <<Students Receiving ESL/Bilingual Educational Services>> pie chart completely filled in with the same color symbolizing 100% nonrecipients (with 0% for both ELLs and bilingual students), it all made a little more sense.

Inofworks also shed some light on how the students are doing academically. In the 2008-09 school year, the third grade students scores dropped from the scores from the previous year in both math and reading. The drop in scores could be from a wide variety of reasons, like lack of resources, big class sizes, different students with different educational backgrounds, but a major factor, I think, is the lack of support the teachers receive from their students’ parents and guardians. I had also asked the teacher about how many parents are actively involved in their children’s education and she replied saying there were about 5 parents who truly care, meaning that there are 19 other parents don’t. Maybe they have good reasons, like work, and as much as I want to pass judgment on them, I can’t. I don’t know their situations or where they are coming from, but I will assume that their situation is different from mine and my family’s, so I can only hope that they are making the best out of it.

When thinking back to my time in third grade and all of the differences between my experiences and these 24 students’ experiences, it automatically becomes a comparison of the “Haves” (me) and the “Have-Nots” (them). I grew up in a small, mostly white, suburban town in central Connecticut. I was one of 21 students, and every one of them was white and only about 1 or 2 students qualified to receive subsidized lunch. Each one of us was able to get new binders and folders at the beginning of the year and could choose any one we wanted off of a shelf at Staples. We all knew what the latest fads were and were “privileged” enough to go along with them, be it Razor scooters or the newest Harry Potter accessory.

In this classroom, the students’ lives are a tad different. They can’t have their parents run off to the mall to buy them a new pair of cleats for the next soccer season. Their teacher passes out new pencils at the beginning of every month for the students whose parents can’t afford to go buy the most basic of school supplies. I am not in the classroom when the students get ready for lunch, but with 68% of the student body eligible for subsidized lunch programs, according to Infoworks, then I can only imagine that at least half of them receive it.

In Johnson’s article, “Our House is On Fire,” he talks about privilege and who has it and who doesn’t and why. Johnson describes privilege as “a social advantage that is both unearned and comes to people simply because they happen to belong to a particular social category.” I fall into the category of a white, upper/middle-middle class female while the two students I personally work with are both Hispanic and are more than likely of a lower-middle/working class family. I’ve grown up with certain privileges that these students won’t. These students face challenges that I didn’t know even existed at their age, but they see them every day. And this isn’t just an isolated problem, one only occurring in this school. It’s happening all across the United States. We can go no longer as a nation pretending that we are not in trouble.

As Johnson said, “Our House Is On Fire,” and it’s high time we did something about it. But, in order for us to make this change, we need to change the way we live our lives. We can no longer take the easiest path, but the one that everyone before us has decided to avoid. To brighten the future of the students we tutor and the millions just like them, we need to take a stand and find ways that break apart this system of privilege, whether it be talking about it, realizing our role in it and working and acting for change.

Prompt #1 Well Over Due

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! =]

Happy 201st Birthday Abraham Lincoln!!

Hey Everyone and anyone-

So I'll be going into the elementary school I'm volunteering at this semester within the next hour!! Kind of nervous. I just don't know what to expect. Hopefully the kids will like me :)

Since today is the kid's last school day before Valentine's Day, I decided to take a trip over to the mall yesterday so I could find something festive to wear. So I'm decked out in pink right now with various heart shaped pieces of jewelry and socks with those Necco sweetheart shapes on them :)

Well, I need to finish getting ready. Hopefully everything goes smoothly today. Either way, Fort Myers: 30 Days =]

Hope you all have a "Fantastic Friday" and a wonderful weekend =]

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<3

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TGIF

Hey everyone!! I hope you all have had a great first week of your second semester! And if not, well there's only 6 more weeks till Spring Break '10 =]

So this is a completely new experience for me. I've been sitting at my computer for 45 minutes already and I have no idea if I'm doing this correctly, but hopefully I am =] So a little about me, my name's Molly, I'm 19 and I grew up in a small town in CT that no one outside of CT has ever heard of. This is my second semester here at RIC and so far I really like and enjoy all of my classes. I am a HUGE Red Sox fan and I'm going down to Fort Myers for Spring Training during our Spring Break and I'm wicked excited!! I'm also really excited for this class and for our tutoring program to begin. I think it will be an insightful and enjoyable experience and I can't wait for Lincoln's Birthday to roll around so I can go in and meet all of the kids!!

Well, I hope you all have a "Better than Best" weekend and see you in class on Monday =]

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