What Makes Great Teaching?

    When I first signed up to take this course it was mostly because it was a required course for me to finish my Bachelor’s degree in education. Right away I knew this would be the course I most connected with. I have been working in education as a paraprofessional for six years. I love my job. I work in a district that is predominantly African American and Hispanic. While this may not seem like a difficult dilemma, it is when you are a Caucasian teacher that students look at you and say that you don’t understand them. This class has inspired me to go beyond building the student-teacher relational trust that I have always prided myself in. 

    While going through this course there were lessons that really stood out and made me rethink how I want my future classroom to be taught. These lessons inspired me to find the best ways to make my classroom more equitable and diverse. 

    Picking my top five lessons was the hardest assignment of all. I loved the Novel Read because it gave me a chance to read a novel for the class that had me really listen to what the book was trying to say. Teaching me to understand the background and experiences of students of color. I feel that this is a must for every classroom in America. Students should be able to read about other backgrounds and experiences than their own and really listen to what they are saying to better understand the differences. 

    Another lesson was about equitable schooling. I was extremely inspired by the TedTalk that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie did on her story of coming to America for college from Africa. The preconception that Africans are poor. Her story reminded me that we can’t judge students by looking at their races or where they came from. For example, you wouldn’t want to label a student as a bad student because they come from a town you feel is a bad town. Students can not help where they are born and raised, all we can do is teach them fairly and be open to hearing their stories.

    One of the last lessons I really connected with was about what lengths I would go to in order to do right by a student. One video I felt I connected to the most was Reality Pedagogy by Christopher Emdin. He mentioned connecting with students and the community that they live in by naming areas of the classroom with landmarks and or street names from the community around the school that the students attend. This gives teachers a way to be culturally responsive in their teaching. 

    Throughout the class, I have added more and more tools to my teaching toolkit in order to become the best teacher I can be for my students. 

    I am glad that this course is required and would highly recommend it to anyone working with children.

It's 2023, Why Are Schools Still Segregated?

 

    When I look at the schools that are in the district I work in I don't instantly think of them as being segregated. There are students from all races and backgrounds. But then I look deeper. The district I work in is East of Austin, Texas and back in 1957, just 66 years ago, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a senator that started a segregation process of whites, African Americans, and Hispanics. He removed Emancipation Park and pushed African Americans and Hispanics to the East side of Austin. This pushed many out of Austin and into areas East of Austin. When I look further into the Manor and Elgin areas I see that the student demographic is predominately African American and Hispanic. Digging even deeper the schools are labeled as Title I because they are in low-income communities. The segregation after slavery was abolished still has lasting effects on the descendants that can not recover from not having the generational wealth that the white families have been able to benefit from.

    The generational wealth that white families have benefitted from gives them higher-class neighborhoods that provide better funding to their schools, thus giving their students a better education. Whereas the neighborhoods dominated by African American and Hispanics are full of families that are unable to get higher paying jobs and are still looked down upon as if they are in the slums or ghettos. The properties have lower local taxes because of this discrimination which brings less money into the schools. With this lower funding, the schools are not on the same level as schools in predominately white neighborhoods. 

    There has to be a change in the system to make education a level playing field for all students. The real question ends up being, how do we do this? And where do we start?

What Lengths Am I Willing to go to in Order to do Right by Every Child?

 

Every day as teachers in the classroom we need to make sure that we are making sure that what we teach to our students is culturally responsive. For some teachers, this term means that they need to tie their lesson content to African American and Latino students' racial backgrounds. In reality, it means mimicking students' cultural learning styles and tools. It means that as teachers we need to know about our students outside the classroom. When they are always playing games to learn things then adapt the lessons to a game that they can play to be inclusive in the learning. Allowing all students to participate in a way that they understand and mimics the way that they live outside the schools. Many teachers have found the platform Blooket.com to be a way that students can learn through games with their peers in the classroom. 

Christopher Edmin, in his TED Talk, about Reality Pedagogy, mentioned that a way to connect with students is through the community. Using names of the street to rename areas of the classroom is one way to make a connection to the students' cultures in the community. Instead of having the students pick up books from the bookshelf they could pick up the books from Main Street. They start to associate the classroom with their community. 

I particularly like when Edmin said, “Belonging and equity are connected”. If a student does not feel like they belong in the classroom and are not getting the services and accommodations needed in order to be successful then there will always be a difficult connection between the student, teachers, and the community. 

So, how far am I willing to go in order to do right for every child? Well, to start off I live in the community I work in. I have built a large base of relational trust with my students. They know that I am aware of the community that we live in and what is going on in many of their lives outside of the classroom. Even on a bad day for the students, they know that they can come into the classroom the next day with a clean slate and that I don’t hold past mistakes against them. Everyone gets a smile and a good morning to start their day. Making sure that students know that they are loved and cared about makes all the difference.

Is School Equitable?

     

     As an educator, schools are not equitable. They are still growing and learning the best practices for instructing the students. Each year new ways of teaching are brought to the forefront of education to help teachers teach with equity. In the meantime, there are quite a few aspects of teaching that still need fixing. I chose this image because equity is not about fairness. It is not about giving each person equal accommodations or teaching only one way. It is about giving each student what they need in order to be successful.

     In the TedTalk, “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, we learn that schools have taught that Africa is full of impoverished, uneducated, overpopulated families. Ms. Adichie described what it was like to attend college in the United States and be treated like she was less than just because she came from Africa. The teachings put an image into the mind of her roommate as to who she was. She wanted to show others that there was more beauty in Africa than what they saw on infomercials and the news. It is the single story that is being told by the education system that is not being fully told from multiple angles.

     I particularly love the video of Rita Pierson telling teachers they need to be a champion for their students. The ones that are hard to like. I can relate so much to this video. I worked in a local middle school where most of the support staff and many teachers did not care for a specific group of kids, an entire grade level to be exact. This group of kids would always push back and refuse to do work in class or make the support staff complain about them. Long story short, these were my “babies.” I fought for them to prove how smart they were and for them to know that someone would always believe in them. Today those rough students are sophomores at our high school. I will often run into them while out and about throughout town and they always come up and tell me what they are doing in school now or that they did get a respectable job. I promised all of them that I would be in the front row at graduation hollering for them so that no one ever had to experience what it was like to not have someone cheering them on.

     School is only equitable if educators learn to respect their students and learn about their cultures, lives, and what makes them so unique. Educators must remember to not be judgmental about the “harder to love” students.

Whose Stories Are Told and Whose Stories Remain in the Margins?

     The education system in the United States of America has become something not fully complete. Throughout the history lessons taught in the schools, the stories from the side of the marginalized are being left out. The history lessons are being “whitewashed” for lack of a better term. Unfortunately, the histories told throughout the world are histories written by the “winners”. No one has wanted to hear the stories of those that lost. Until now. Now society wants to hear the other side. We want to hear the side of the less fortunate, the ones that had their dreams, goals, families, and very lives ripped out from underneath them. 

    All over social media right now is the image of little, Ruby Bridges, as she walks into an all-white school surrounded by armed deputies with the caption, “If this little girl was strong enough to survive it, your child is strong enough to learn about it.” What is the fear that this image brings up? It is the fear of the Anglo Americans that don’t want their children to know that they stood there shouting racial slurs or didn’t want an African American child in school with their precious Anglo children. United States education wants the sordid past of slavery and segregation to be wiped from the textbooks like it never happened or that it isn’t still happening. That little girl is a 68-year-old woman who still fights for the rights of marginalized students to this day. 

    So the stories that are told are the ones with "white" privilege and the stories that remain in the margins, but hopefully not for much longer, are the ones that need to be told for the under-served, the low-income, the ones persecuted for their religious beliefs, their sexual orientation, the color of their skin, the language that they speak, and so much more.

    After all, George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So, as a society, we need to stand up and not repeat the history of suppressing the stories that need to be told.

What is the Purpose of School?

    When the United States became a country unto itself school was something that was usually taught by the local pastor or preacher. It mixed religion with learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools were what set apart the wealthy upper class and the poor working class. Girls were taught to be perfect wives that raised the children and supported their husbands. Meanwhile, the boys were taught and prepared for college. 

    It wasn’t until the 1840s that Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann decided that schools needed to be separate from religion. They wanted to make an education system that was free and open to all genders and classes. This was to “create better citizens and a culturally uniform American society” (Whitmer).

 

    Looking at schools today they are far different than what our founding fathers originally thought and planned out for society. Schools have now become a place that not only teaches students their reading, writing, and arithmetic but also gives the social and emotional learning that they are not getting elsewhere. Public schools are a place where children are taught to make friends and socialize. 

    With the Covid pandemic of 2020 when schools were forced to shut down it became glaringly obvious that schools, in fact, do so much more than just teach students the basics. Schools have found ways to feed students and even those too young to enter the school system. Many schools provided breakfast and lunches to the students for the remainder of the 2020 school year, and the following summer, which carried over into the 2020-2021 school year. Schools had to provide internet services to the students that remotely learned during that time through hotspots. Stephen Sawchuk made the greatest statement about students in schools in his article “What is the Purpose of School?” when he said, “students will face difficulty learning if they are not fed, clothed, and nurtured” (Sawchuk). Thus schools became food pantries, found ways through programs such as Communities in Schools that would be able to provide necessary clothing to the students, and teachers became like second parents giving love and a feeling of safety to their students.

    Schools have taken on so many different aspects of the education system for children in the United States. Things can always change for the better, but it will take time. Prince EA, a civil rights activist from St. Louis, MO really put it into perspective when he said, “Children are twenty percent of our population, but they are one hundred percent our future” (EA). Knowing that statistics alone should make Americans wonder about what they want the future of America to be. Change starts with the children and they need to be taught in a way that will allow for this change to take place.

Works Cited:

EA, Prince. “I Sued the School System (2023).” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Sept. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqTTojTija8&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fcanvas.txstate.edu%2Fcourses%2F2046940%2Fpages%2Ftask-1-m2-video-break%3Fmodule_item_id%3D94857595&feature=emb_imp_woyt. 

Sawchuk, Stephen. “What Is the Purpose of School?” What Is the Purpose of School?, Education Week, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-is-the-purpose-of-school/2021/09. 

Whitmer, Phil. “What Were the Original Goals and Purpose of the American Education System?” What Were the Original Goals and Purpose of the American Education System?, 30 June 2020, https://classroom.synonym.com/were-purpose-american-education-system-8052005.html.

The Dream of Teaching

    I have always dreamed of being a teacher. I pretended I was a teacher for my little sister and all of my dolls growing up. I didn’t grow up with very much money in my family so we never traveled anywhere. My mom would always tell us, kids, “The only way you will travel the world is through a book.” So we read all of the time. In 6th grade, I had been an aide for the Librarian and would spend my recesses in the library re-shelving books. By the time I graduated from high school, I had been enrolled at ten different schools from kindergarten to my senior year. When I was able to find a position within a school I was able to show the students that no matter what hardships we face in life we could always find a way to learn and grow from them. The best part about being a teacher is that students will remember you for life.

    I started working with my children’s school with the after-school program and worked my way up to being an intervention paraprofessional at Elgin Middle School. I supported the ELA department with intervention support. During the first half of the year, I would push into classes and support small groups inside the class. After the holiday break and the new semester started I would change to small group STAAR prep. This gave me a chance to take what the students were learning inside their ELA/R classes and bring it more focused to a small group instead of a whole class. I did this for three years while I attended Austin Community College. Right now I work at Neidig Elementary School as an Early Childhood Literacy Specialist. I work with kindergarten to second grade teaching them the basics of letter sounds all the way up to reading fluency. This will be my second year in the position. This position has given me a chance to see the art of reading from a very basic start. I am currently in my second semester at Texas State University majoring in Education Instruction in ELA/R and Social Studies for grades 4 to 8. My love for reading and history inspired me to enter into this subject and my absolute love for the pre-teen/early teen years made me decide to go with the middle school ages. I love their sarcasm, they want to be a grown-up, but still want to learn and have fun at school.