Points of Disruption: First of all, I have to say that I loved this book. I liked feeling like I was there in the classroom with the kids. However, this was also difficult, because I felt the conflicts of both the teacher and students. For instance, the story about Reggie being beat up by a cop for no reason was heartbreaking. How do you let a student know that they matter when the very people who should be protecting them are hurting them? I also had to kick myself a little. With all the protests going on about cops shooting black men, I just kind of thought that we've moved past this, people don't do that for no reason and they are beating a dead horse. However, this is obviously not true. As much as I want to believe in the goodness of mankind, these kids live in a world where they have to watch out for themselves--even among friends at a school sponsored event.
I also struggle with the idea of helping kids outside of class. I am just one person. I want to teach English, and I'm not very outspoken outside of the classroom. How involved am I supposed to get, and how much influence do I really have. If I interrupt my students doing a drug deal, because they hardly have the money to keep food on the table, what am I supposed to do? There are also fine lines. This teacher goes and visits students outside of school, takes them to concerts, but aren't there laws about how much contact you are supposed to have outside of school?
When Mr. Michie first begins team teaching, he and his fellow teacher create a unit on being Mexican American. I thought this was brilliant, I also saw some problems. What if I end up teaching in Arizona? The law prohibits teachers from involving Spanish or hispanic culture in the classroom, but these students live right next to the border even if they aren't hispanic themselves. That culture is part of their lives. I want to bring it into the classroom, but I also don't want to lose my job.
Examples of Ideas We Discussed in Class: I mentioned before how much I loved the idea of a unit based just on Mexican American identity. I felt like this incorporated a lot of what we talked about with inclusive pedagogy. The teachers didn't take the kids experiences and apply them to school, they took school and applied it to things the kids were already a part of. The kids were allowed to use their funds of knowledge to enrich the course. They had the opportunity to explore and value the culture that they had been so afraid to share with their peers before.
One of the other stories I appreciated was the very first one about Tavares. You loved the cheeky kid from the teacher's side of the story, but hearing Tavares' own background really shed a lot of light on what he went through as a kid. He was involved in gangs and drug-dealing. He was poor and got kicked out of his home and later dropped out of school. He fit right in with the stories we discussed of kids struggling with poverty or identity. He found it educating as an adult just to discover that not all black people were poor. Wasn't that something he should have learned long before then? He was so honest of about getting mixed up in gangs--he just wanted to get his life back on track, and for a while it looked like that would do it for him.
How the Stories Will Influence my Work as a Teacher: If you haven't noticed yet, I was absolutely enchanted by the assignment on exploring what it means to be Mexican American. I feel like this is a unit that should be done in any classroom in the west, just so students are aware of it. THere are plenty of Mexican American authors who I would like to include in my classroom. My students should understand that not all authors are just one background or culture. You could also bring school to the students more subtly by assigning a small paper on the cultures of the country that their ancestors came to America from. However long ago that was, they would have the opportunity to look at a culture and say what they wished had stayed with their family. This would also allow more recent immigrants to share their stories without picking them out specifically.
I also thought about how Mr. Michie tried to involve literature that had multiple backgrounds. There is no one kind of student, so there should never be just one kind of book. I think it would be interesting to have book discussions where students are asked to read books on different perspectives of the same event. The students showed that they could argue a point they didn't agree with even with little preparation. I would love to see what a class could do with more time.
The thing I most identified with however, was the importance of showing genuine curiosity and interest in a student. Some of them may be hard to love, but that doesn't mean that they are less deserving of it. You have to watch out-make sure none of them slip through the cracks, and that is hard. But I do believe that in order to really teach a student, you have to show that you care about them and respect them. No matter what is going on in their home life, they should feel safe and comfortable in your classroom. That may at times require me to be less distant that I, as a reserved person, am comfortable with, but it is worth it.
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