fli's blog

Park Elementary School is a small public elementary school in the suburbs of Pennsylvania. The school is one story above ground, and one story below. In front of the school is a large, well paved parking lot. The cars are not luxury cars, but they are clean and shiny. The building is also clean, and kind of pretty. Walking in, you can see that the interior is bright and spacious. There is a sign directing you to enter the main office first. The secretary who I shall call Carla is well put together, dressed in a floral blouse, some dark jeans, and a pair of boots. Today is Wednesday, February 13, the first day of my field placement, and I am normally supposed to show up on Fridays. 

I tell the secretary that I am from Bryn Mawr, and that I normally would show up on Fridays, but I could not make it the Friday before so I am here today. Carla smiles and accepts my explanation, scans my ID, gives me a visitor tag, and tells me that the teachers are in a meeting. There is no animosity, no rush in her movements. While I wait in the office for the meeting to end, a child walks in. Carla greets him by name, and asks him why he is there so early. Without hesitation, he looks Carla in the eye and answers her. 

In Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, she explores how children grow up and are treated differently because of class, gender, and sometimes race. 

The middle class children all underwent concerted cultivation. Their language was nurtured by their parents. They were taught to shake hands, look people in the eye, and to expect others to bend to their way of thinking. Their parents were always involved in their packed lives, and often had to give up much of their own lives in order to fully cultivate them. Most of their lives were scheduled, and without organized activities, many of them felt lost.

The working class or poor children all were left to natural development. Vocal exchanges are always short and to the point, with little done to encourage the children’s growth in language. Many of them lived in places where they could not look people in the eye, and they were taught to respect what elders said. If a parent said, “Jump,” they are expected to reply with something along the lines of, “How high?”. For many of their parents, it is enough work to make sure they go to school, do homework, and have food in their bellies. Anything extra is extra work and hassle they do not want to deal with. They have much free time, and their creativity allows them to fill that time with games and activities they organize. 

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Barney
    How Barney and other such cartoons taught me all I knew of social interaction.

Chapter 2: Grammar
    Nouns? What are nous? What is this grammar I need to learn?

Chapter 3: Multiplication Tables and Elementary Math
    Practice makes perfect was firmly enforced when it came to math.

Chapter 4: Chores
    How I sometimes did more chores than homework.

Chapter 5: Books
    How reading changed my life.

Chapter 6: Languages
    How languages have played a part in my education.

Chapter 7: Freshman Year
    The issues I faced, and the things I learned

Chapter 8: Sophomore Year
    How I picked my major, and how I did something that made me wonder if I wasted more than 5 years of my life.

Chapter 9: The Present
    Oh dear. I’m a junior. Now what?


Chapter 3: Multiplication Tables and Elementary Math