Prompt #4

As a tutor I am aware that where I am teaching there is a diverse group of children in the classroom. I also notice that there are social cultural factors that do affect the learning of these children. The difficult part of this is coping with the students that may not always comprehend what I am trying to do or have difficulty maintain focus on the activities. As a “rookie” in this field I try to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they are going through at a young age.

If I came into this thinking that I could just tutor the students and it will all work easily I would have had a difficult time in completing my duty. I understood the diversity and differences and individually tried to apply my time and knowledge to each student because of their different backgrounds. A couple of my students spoke Spanish at home which made it difficult at times for them to understand my directions and what I wanted them to do. I tried to remain patient and calm; this helped because the students gradually became better at the activities they needed to do.

The area of my elementary school wasn’t as bad as these children have to deal with. The parks and buildings are old and tarnished. There is a lack of teacher assistants and after school activities. This can relate to when Kozol talks about the importance of money and funding properly. If these areas would have more money I believe that students can focus more on school then their lives outside of it, and have better academic opportunities. All these students are different and may have better lives than others. Comparing my life to a majority of these students childhood is different also. I lived in a peaceful middle-class environment where I would never have to worry about anything outside the classroom.

This also can relate to Carlson when he says “no one speaks from nowhere, and no one speaks from everywhere”. I interpret this as that everyone has a background where they came from, and everyone has difference. Contrary to that, no one can say they have dealt with all kinds of differences because you can’t put yourself in everyone’s shoes. It is difficult to say that you have dealt with the same problems as everyone else.

There were challenges in trying to get the students to cooperate and at times I would get frustrated if they kept repeating their errors. Then I came to realize there is only so much the teacher can do in school with every student individually. The students probably get a limited amount of help at home and have different sociocultural backgrounds and their parents maybe ELL’s. An advantage to this was that my parents didn’t speak English when I was younger and they eventually learned it later on. This made me understand where the students came from and how to cope with them. I had some misconceptions on the students who spoke a language besides English. I thought that they would have difficulty understand the readings, but one of my most productive student spoke English and Spanish so it contradicted my misconception.