One particular experience that I want to bring individual attention to because to me I think it really helped my development of becoming a teacher. There was one girl in my class who I’ll call K who had pretty serious cerebral palsy and a difficult hearing problem in addition to the numerous social and linguistic difficulties that went along with her condition. She was probably one of the sweetest students I have ever met and I met her very early on in my tutoring. On my first day the teacher put me one on one with K so I could help her through her math worksheet. Talk about throwing somebody into the deep end. I was a freshman whose first teaching experience was this and I’m placed with a student with numerous challenges and I was terrified.
I learned though that I really enjoyed working with K despite the obvious difficulties that went along with it. It was extremely frustrating at times and on occasion got to very disheartening points but then she would say something absolutely unexpected and funny and I was hooked again. I helped K a lot throughout my time at the school because it was clear that she was one of the students that needed the most help. I found it surprising how much of her day was spent in the normal 3rd classroom. She was there for basically all but 20 min everyday where she would go and work with a speech teacher.
Her involvement in the classroom really reminded me of what I read in Kliewer’s article about including students with disabilities into the main stream classroom. I believe that it was a benefit to K because she got to interact with the other students and they were able to become more comfortable with students like her. Socially the environment was very respectful with all the students trying to help out K whenever and however they could. It also seemed like she was learning at pace with the other students despite her disability. Though requiring some extra tutoring K was always on top of her homework assignments and did pretty well on tests.
Meeting K was probably one of the most educational experiences of my life. She taught me patience and helped me improve my skills of working with disabled students. I feel my experience with her will only make me grow as an education student and I will become a better teacher because of it.

A fresh perspective. (Prompt 4)

This being my freshman year of college I am fresh out of the Barrington school system. Growing up in a completely white upper middle class environment like Barrington there are some personal characteristics that I developed that I am not proud of. These include different misconceptions about groups that I had not a lot of experience with. For example before moving to RIC I had very little interaction with other cultures and because of that held some hesitancy when dealing with them. I would in no way have considered myself prejudice but before my experiences this year I was certainly biased toward what I know.

This initially played a part in my tutoring. On my first day though trying to keep an open mind I found myself filled with all these preconceived notions about how the class would be. I thought they would difficult to manage and noisy and disrespectful, but boy was I proven wrong. After only a few hours with the kids I found them to be for the most part very polite and good natured children who despite growing up with disadvantages I never had to face were developing into very fine individuals. I couldn’t have been more wrong with my biases and I learned from these kids to always keep an open mind and never jump to conclusions. This is a lesson that as I teacher I will hold with me for the entirety of my career.

This experience to me relates to Johnson’s main points in his articles, “My house is on fire” and “Who , me?”. What these articles talked about were privilege and oppression and how they play out in society today. One main point was that those raised in privilege perpetuate the cycle of privilege and oppression because they don’t know any better and how this can only be solved through individual’s efforts and experiences. I feel because of my own experiences with privilege and my biases being thrown out the window first hand I am on my way to developing a more comprehensive teaching mentality and attitude.

The Spanish Speaking Story (Question 2)

The first day I walked into my classroom I found that it wasn’t so much diverse like I had expected but instead almost all of the students were from some sort of Spanish speaking descent. Apart from a few black kids and one Vietnamese girl the students families were from places such as mexico and the Dominican republic. From this I found that many students came from homes where English is not the primary language. This poses obvious problems especially in reading comprehension and writing.

For much of my time tutoring I was helping the students with various writing assignments. Immediately I found out that their writing skills weren’t up to the same quality as other 3^rd graders. This relates to the Goldenberg article about teaching ESL students. There are obvious disadvantages for students who’s first language isn’t English. I found that one student got so frustrated that he wrote his story with the characters speaking Spanish. Though the narrative was in English or broken English as the case may be it was clear that the student was proficient enough in the language to produce a fully English story. Goldenberg talked about students falling farther and farther behind in school because of the language boundaries that the children faced.

I found that the teacher had trouble with these problems as well. For example she had a long conversation with the girl about her Spanish speaking characters trying to emphasize the importance of her writing in English just leading to the student’s frustration and eventually writing a whole new story. The end result was a student who was so disheartened by the situation that she produced a sub-par story and received a poor grade and a whole lot of frustration. It is clear that something must be done to deal with these problems such as more involved Spanish to English assignments and even working with parents to encourage English speaking at home.

Blog Question 6

After talking with the students for a few weeks I began to learn more and more about them and a few of them actually divulged some information about their family lives. Between those unique experiences and some comments I overheard I learned a lot about the different challenges these kids face at home. I got a few comments from some students about their family not having enough money to support even the simplest of school necessities such as pencils and fieldtrip money. Other more severe issues were like one that I overheard from one girl. She was talking about how a lot has changed at home since DCYF had gotten involved. I was unaware of the specifics of the situation but I could only imagine the worse.

It was situations like this that got me thinking about how I would deal if I was the teacher of these students. I can already imagine the obvious troubles with language barriers since the majority of the students’ parents are Spanish speaking and some that is the only language that they are fluent in. But I’m not sure where my responsibilities lay as the teacher to get involved in serious family issues. For example if I was the teacher and overheard one of the students talking about abuse at home is it my place to report it? Should I contact the family first? Is it even appropriate for me to get involved because after the school day is over I turn from being the primary authority figure to an adult who is crossing his boundaries in these students life, at least that’s how some parents might take it.

Apart from those most serious situations there is also the issue of collaboration with parents which I believe is always a necessity for maximizing a student’s educational opportunities. I think that I would try my best to include the parents and hopefully have frequent meetings so that we would be able to help the students both at school and on the home front. This is of course a utopian ideal that is most likely unattainable with parents who some work 2 or 3 jobs while others just don’t care to be involved in their kids’ education. Honestly I find trouble dealing in hypothetical with a situation of this importance and I can only speculate what I would do, but without actually participating first hand instead of as an observer it is tough to imagine.

Blog Question 1

Walking in to my school on my first day I really had no idea what to expect. In fact I actually made the mistake of going to the wrong school. There were two schools right next to each other, one was an elementary school and the other was a middle school. I was assigned to tutor at the elementary school so obviously I walked into that one first only to find out that it wasn’t my school. Confused I then decided to walk next door to the middle school and found out that in fact my elementary school was indoors as well. This one building was hosting kids from kindergarten to 8^th grade. That was initially very shocking to me seeing how I attended 3 different schools in the same district in that same time period (K-3, 4-5, 6-8). It was apparently over-crowded and I could only imagine the issues that would arise with 8^th graders mingling with 3^rd graders every day. It just didn’t seem practical to me.

I tried to withhold judgment though until I actually got into my classroom and that was a good thing because I immediately enjoyed my experience once I started meeting with the kids. They were all very friendly and were always quick with a compliment. A day didn’t go by without “hey man I like your hair” or “Ben sweet kicks” or even the occasionally “Mr. Wilder I’m digging the look today”. I don’t know if they were trying to suck up to the new tutor or were raised to always respect your elders, either way it was a very nice environment.

The teacher greeted me with an exasperated smile clearly grateful for the incoming help dealing with a more than full class. She sat me down in an absent students seat and for the first half hour or so had me observe. I found that the classroom was a bit of a tight fit but all necessary needs were met as far as supplies go. The only issue was that with the high number of students it was difficult for the teacher to maintain control of the class often resulting in her having to raise her voice or make an example of a single student. I soon found that the class was structured on strict discipline very similar to the teaching styles that Kozol described when talking about inner city New York schools.

Overall I found my first day being a bit of a surprise with the building not being what I expected and the students being much friendlier then I had imagined and the teacher so collected despite her hectic occupation. I could tell it took a certain kind of environment to deal with the issues in inner-city schools and that apart from a few flaws that this school had developed such an environment.

Who am I?

My name is Ben Wilder and this is the first blog I have ever used for a classroom. It seems like it will be a pretty effective way to communicate to our classmates. I am a second semester freshman who is right now studying to be a Technology Education teacher but I am also going to try to get a physics minor and possibly a mathematics minor so that I will become certified in those fields as well. Outside of the classroom I spend a good portion of my time playing the greatest sport ever invented Ultimate Frisbee and a member of the RICdiculous Ultimate team. I also am loosely involved in a couple of other organizations. For the most part I like to spend my down time with my friends tossing the disc or just hanging out. I am pretty excited for this tutoring program seeing as I have up to now very little classroom experience other than being a student for 19 years and a few lesson plans that I had to present to middle schoolers as a part as some of my Tech Ed courses. I feel like it'll be a good experience and reaffirm my desires to become an educator.