Promt #3:

In the second grade classroom that I have been working in the teacher has not portrayed a culturally competent teaching style. He absolutely did not accommodate sociocultural differences. During the class there were many students with ADHD, which is a hyper active disorder that some children have that enables them to focus. However, when these students would try to express their opinions in the class room the teacher would immediately turn them down. The teacher seemed to always pick on the same students who clearly were troubled. When dealing with a student with ADHD symptoms you have to handle them in a different way than you normally would a student without this disorder. You have to give them boundaries, and at the same time you have to let them stretch their imagination and capabilities. For example, the way a child would act ranged in many different ways. One little boy would cry silently because he didn’t understand the work, whereas another little boy would start to scream. Instead of the teacher responding in an adult way, he would instead stoop down to the child’s level and fight with the child without asking why the child was acting this way. The teacher would immediately assume he was being bad.

Since the teacher grew accustomed to this student’s outbreaks, whenever one of the hyperactive children would have a good day the teacher would not praise the behavior and would instead continue to yell at the child for anything they did that was somewhat wrong. For example, one particular boy was very quiet one day. He did all of his work up until the math lesson. The teacher was explaining how to do addition and subtraction with the number ten. The boy did not understand so he stopped working. The teacher then yelled at him and the boy cried out that he did not understand what was going on during the lesson. Instead of the teacher explaining, he thought the boy was misbehaving and made the boy stand for the remainder of that lesson.

This reminds me of the situation in the article “All Speech Is Not Free” by Megan Boler when she states that “hostility that targets marginalized people on the basis of their assumed inferiority carries more weight than hostility expressed by a marginalized person toward a member of the dominant class.” Megan Boler believes that ignorance arises directly from our youth when we are in the classroom’s environment. When I read this article, the beginning immediately reminded me of this teacher. He always picks on the same students and does not allow them to voice their opinions. All voices in his classroom are not equal. This teacher portrays every negative aspect that Megan Boler explains about the white dominant and white supremacy ideologies.