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The End!

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  For my last blog, I will reflect on this semester as a whole. Looking back on this semester there were many assignments and in-class discussions I classify as memorable. This class has definitely shaped me as an educator and will affect my schooling going forward (in the best way). The support of Dr. Stevos and her drive for all of her students to do well will be incredibly memorable for me. The community building made the class feel less like a regular college course and more like a community. One thing that will stick with me is the “moo in” portion of each class. I feel like that style of community building really helped me to connect and get to know my peers. I think that this could be used in my future classroom, maybe not every day since I will be teaching high school, but definitely as an icebreaker. Another thing that will stick with me is the debate I had in the beginning of the semester between different students. It taught us how to be respectful but to also stand our ...
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Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students

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  This week we were assigned to watch a Woke Read Aloud video and read the RI Department of Education's Guidance for Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students. In this blog I will be connecting the video and reading.  The video by Woke Kindergarten is a video intended for a younger audience. The reader is showing the viewers a book called They, She, He Easy as ABC which shows young children how it is easy to respect a person's pronouns and gender expression. The reader, Ki, does a great job at explaining how, yes it can be confusing at first, but that does not mean we should not listen to a person when they tell us their pronouns. They even go into explaining that just because a person presents as a certain gender, we should not assume that they use the pronouns attached to that particular gender. Ki also touches on people who use multiple sets of pronouns such as they/she. They do an awesome job at explaining it in a way that young students can understand but also...
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Richard Rodriguez

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  This week's reading is by Richard Rodriguez and I will be connecting his writing to my experiences in a dual language classroom at Alfred Lima Elementary School. Rodriguez begins his story with how he did not speak English when he went to school in America. Like most students in the classroom I’m in, his family spoke Spanish in their house. He calls Spanish a private language and English a public one. I thought that was an interesting way to put it since both Spanish and English are commonly used now in public spaces, especially in Providence. His lack of knowledge of English and lack of wanting to conform to “los gringos” as he called them, caused him to struggle with participation. At Alfred Lima I’m happy to report that no student is lacking in participation due to a lack of understanding. The children at Alfred Lima are in a space that welcomes Spanish as much as it does English. These students are encouraged to read and write in Spanish and English to ensure that they are ...
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Literacy with an Attitude

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  This week's reading was on Literacy with an Attitude by Patrick J. Finn. This post will be a reflection of Finn’s writing with my own experience as a student and being a staff member in the classroom. I’m going to focus on the second chapter, titled “A Distinctly Un-American Idea: An Education Appropriate to Their Station.” This chapter follows Jean Anyon who observes elementary classrooms of the top 1 percent income, upper class elementary schools, middle class elementary schools, and working class elementary schools in New Jersey. All of the schools consisted of white students and no students of color. They were all taught the same requirements and had the same books for math. However each class was completely different in how they taught.  Lower class students were given direct orders, were controlled constantly, and their teachers often thought lowly of them. Middle class was about how much you could know. They wanted their students to know the right answers and the...
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Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and What to Look for in a Classroom

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  This week's Blog post is on the Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Learning for Justice and What to Look for in a Classroom by Alfie Kohn. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy is important in the classroom because it links students' everyday cultural experiences to what the students are learning. By doing this students will be able to make bridges with each other's cultures. They’ll be able to connect what they know to what is being taught in the classroom. If a teacher is trying to educate their students using one set of cultural filters and experiences that does not align with all students, the students then have to take that information and put it through their own cultural filter. This is what causes students to not completely understand the lessons being taught in the classroom. They’re working overtime to try and understand what is being taught to them. The video makes it very clear that culture and race are not the same thing. Two black children may not hav...
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Troublemakers

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  This week we were assigned to read the Preface and Introduction of Troublemakers by Carla Shalaby. In this book, Shalaby begins by discussing the many flaws of our school systems today. How we as a society let too many underprivileged children slip through the cracks at school simply because they do not fit our mold. This is an extreme opinion about our school system that does not apply to every school. Yes, some too many kids are unfortunately left behind in the school system. I do not believe this is because schools have a mold that students cannot fit in. Instead, I believe that students slip through the cracks because they’re are simply too many students and not enough teachers. Many teachers have an overflow of students due to the teacher shortage happening in our country. They have classrooms of 20 or 30 students, which is impossible to handle. In such large classroom settings, you cannot take the time to ensure each child is progressing sufficiently. This unfortunately ...
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Class Dismissed and The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies

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                                   For this blog post, I will be touching on two things assigned to us this week. An excerpt from the film Class Dismissed   which can be watched here , and the research review entitled, The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies .  I would like to start with the short video first. This video starts by discussing how children going to school for learning is fairly new for us as a society. Children used to be homeschooled by their mothers, but when Massachusetts’ first Department of Education made it so children from the age of four to 16 had to attend school regularly, things changed. They were taught to be on time, to listen to authority and many other things that would make them ideal workers and military personnel. This was during the industrialization of our country, so the government wanted children to learn how to be productive members of the cha...
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