Catherine's Blog

  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 ...

  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...

  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...

  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 ...