Prompt #4:

It’s understandable that no one enters a classroom without a personal history and no one enters a classroom completely free of bias. However, as a teacher I believe that you have to hold back judgments because of the diverse world that we are living in. I grew up in a predominantly white school system. It was not until my high school years that I interacted with other students of color. However, my school system always incorporated other cultures in our lesson plans. We did many projects on other cultures. So for me, going into a classroom with such a diverse ethnicity never really bothered me. Especially after meeting the children and seeing past the exterior you learn this should not even count as a factor in a person’s judgment.

An advantage that I had in this classroom was that I have had previous experience working in other classrooms. Overall I thought the teacher I was working with was very unprofessional. It was obvious as well that the tactics this teacher was using was not beneficial to the class. The things that the teacher would say to the students were not appropriate and it ultimately made the students disrespect the teacher. Students would actually tell the teacher off and they were only in second grade. By watching many of these incidents in the class room and the terrible outbreaks that would occur between both the students and the teachers immediately reminded me of the article “Our House is On Fire” by Allan Johnson. Johnson believes that race and social habits are an invention, which clearly in this classroom the teacher is inventing a bad environment for all students. This teacher does not do what Allan Johnson strongly suggests such as champion diversity, promote tolerance and celebrate difference. Instead this teacher brings a negative environment to the classroom.

The teacher seemed very surprised when I told him how many books the two children and I read together. He did not understand how the two kids that I worked with could read so many books when their reading score was so low. The children and I did an activity that involved timed reading. It became a game for them. We would read a 7 page book; which was normally between 200 to 250 words. The students would read it three different times, the first time they would read normal, the second time they would pay attention to punctuation and voice expression, and the third time they would try to read as fast as they could. By doing this it naturally would lessen their time within each try. One boy actually beat his first attempt by over two minutes. Allan Johnson states that “we are, all of us, responsible for the future and that what happens now, it is because of human beings whose choices shape how that system happens from one moment to the next.” This teacher has not dared to do anything different to help the way these students learn.