gcrossnoe's blog

Hello all!

I found a short booklet in Canaday earlier this week (on that table in the atrium where there are free books) that you all might find interesting. It is called "Speak Up at School: How to Respond to Everyday Prejudice, Bias, and Stereotypes." This booklet was published by Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The website has the following blurb to explain why this was published:

This guide is for the adults in the school. It offers advice about how to respond
to remarks made by students and by other adults and gives guidance for helping
students learn to speak up as well. We believe that modeling the kind of behavior
we want from students is one of the most effective ways of teaching it.

I think it is really interesting, and could be a good resource for educators. If you want to read the booklet, you can find the PDF here: http://www.tolerance.org/publication/speak-school

I have also found some more interesting publications for educators by Teaching Tolerance, including "Anti-bias Framework" and "Creating an LGBT-Inclusive School Climate" that you can explore here: http://www.tolerance.org/publications

Enjoy!

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.