Next Top Learners

Letting the Little Ballerina Do Her Ballerina Twirls

            For my field placement, I mentor a third grade student, Anna, at an elementary school in West Philadelphia.  One week, as part of the mentoring program, the mentors and their mentees, along with a chaperone from the school, took a field trip to Chinatown.  As the students had lived in Philadelphia their whole lives, I was surprised to learn they had never been to Chinatown. 

            The first place we visited was a Chinese bakery.  Using the five dollars given to her by the school, Anna bought a fried shrimp dumpling.  Upon seeing what she had chosen, the chaperone congratulated Anna for “trying something strange.”  This comment made me uncomfortable, but as I had met the chaperone an hour before I did not feel as though I could say anything. 

            Although Anna did not respond to the comment and seemed to quickly forget it, this moment has stuck with me.  It reminded me of times in my own education when we learned about different cultures and the tone of these lessons. 

I spend every Thursday afternoon at an after-school tutoring program at North Elementary School. I, along with other a few other college students, spend about an hour and a half with a group of 2nd and 3rd graders that have been identified by the school as students that need additional help with homework and reading. I was assigned one boy, Jason, and I work with him every week.

Jason is incredibly energetic, talkative, and bright. He has often finished his homework in class and asks me to create math problems on a small dry erase board for him to complete. He picks out books to read without complaint, and is able to read them aloud with an expected level of difficulty.

However, he does not like working at the computer. There is a reading program on the computer that each student is supposed to spend approximately 10 - 15 minutes on each afternoon, but Jason tries his best to get out of it. He haggles with me over the amount of time he is supposed to work, asking me if he can stop when the "big hand" on the clock is at a certain number. When we have agreed on a place where the "big hand" will indiciate he can quit the computer program, Jason often dawdles, speaks to other students, or asks to go to the restroom, hoping he can waste time.

I found Lareau's categorization of child-rearing into two distinct methods, concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth, and her ascription of each method to a specific socioeconomic class to be very problematic.

Every year the students in Ms. Shomphe’s tenth grade English class read Night by Elie Wiesel.  And every year, this reading is prefaced with a lesson about how everyone has been affected by bullying at some point in their lives.  The point of this lesson is to relate the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust to something within the realm of the students’ experiences.  However, rather than opening the door to a new, more thorough understanding of the text, this lesson has the effect of unintentionally belittling and minimalizing the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust.

The summer following tenth grade I had the opportunity to visit the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.  It was only there that I was able to begin to grasp the gravity of this tragedy.  Walking through the desolate camp, seeing the crematories, and the “beds” where the prisoners slept illustrated this in a way that a lesson on bullying never could.  Witnessing this first hand allowed me to understand the severity of the situation that Ms. Shomphe had attempted to convey.  However, not every student will have the opportunity to visit a concentration camp or even walk through a Holocaust museum.  How, then, should teachers wishing to incorporate students’ experiences into the classroom approach the teaching of human tragedies well outside the scope of their students’ experiences or even imaginations?

Reflection #2

Freire and Ebonics

Quela Jules

2/20/13

            Two friends came to me outraged last week about a heated discussion regarding the use of Ebonics in the classroom and whether or not it should be fostered, or tolerated in schools. A white male student blatantly said that Standard American English is the only acceptable form of English in the United States. I am not here to say whether I agree or disagree with his stance on the topic, but rather to provide a series of images related to it. What was difficult about hearing the man speak was not the words he was saying, but the position from which he spoke, he was white, privileged, and conservative, and one could infer that his main contact with African American Vernacular comes from Hip Hop, or the words that have somehow made their way into the vocabularies of the young white and privileged. He is speaking as someone who has only had to master one language his whole life and fully understands the privilege in that.

“I am a ‘conditioned’ being, capable of going beyond my own conditioning”

There were many times while I was reading The Pedagogy of Freedom, where I was nodding in agreement to many of the theoretical concepts discussed by Paulo Freire. The book may have seemed a bit excessive in really “hammering” the main points repeatedly, and some of the concepts could have benefited from more relatable examples to help the readers who struggled with abstractness of his thinking. However, personally I felt that the book really encompassed my perspectives on the pedagogy, duty and the responsibility of what it means to be a teacher.

The practice of right thinking, according to Freire, is grounded in a number of factors, one of which includes teaching by example.  When teachers engage in right thinking they are open to multiple answers, and are able to acknowledge and respect the autonomy and lived experiences of their students. Right thinking stands in opposition to the banking system of education because it recognizes that education is not the transferring of knowledge but the wonder of curiosity and discovery. In describing right thinking, Freire emphasized the importance of leading by example by saying “right thinking is right doing”, but what does it mean for educators to teach by example? How are authorities responsible for fostering right thinking?

Reflective Writing in Response Groups #1

Critical Issues in Education

Table of Contents

1. Learning in the Island
2. The Great Escape: Immigrating to the United States
3. The Trouble with the Accent
4. Girls Inc.
5. Propellers: The Role of Mentors
6. Posse
7. Bryn Mawr

II. The Great Escape: Immigrating to the United States

Table of Contents

1. The First Grade

2. My First Kiss

3. America’s Next Top Model

4. A Peoples History Of The United States

1. The First Grade

This Christmas in my mother’s stocking was a clear square box full of cards. On the label the words said “table topics”. On each card was a question intended to spark either debate or conversation at any family gathering. My mother likes to be the one to ask the questions so one day on the car, with her cards in hand, she turned to me and asked “what was your worst fear as a child?” I didn’t know, I didn’t remember. I then returned my question to her, “I don’t know, do you remember?” “Yes I do” she nodded. Through a smile she said “It was Harriet Tubman. You used to make me check under your bed every night.” I laughed hard, that is hilarious! A little black girl terrified of Harriet Tubman! Hahaha! But after the laughter I started to remember, and I started to think, I was afraid of Harriet Tubman. I think maybe I was too young to be taught slavery when I learned it. I was in the first grade.