Last night's class really open my eyes about the racial differences in students. I came from an all white elememtary school and an all white high school and I did not have classes with black students until college. I think it is so important to educate our teachers about the cultural differences in our students. We need to know what kinds of backgrounds our students come from. Melvin brought up good points about the little boy who talked to much in class. We need to be sensitive to these kinds of things and not always assume that children are being trouble makers, they are just doing what they are accustom to. We as teachers need to be willing to make compromises to accommodate our students.

Kristie,

I agree with you 100%. We do need to understand cultural differences. I had a hard time understanding why all of the calls to the boy's mother were necessary. I also wondered if this was actually a situation where the child just wasn't following the rules? I mean as a parent we want our kids to succeed and if a teacher called and said your child is not following the rules and is talking to much, then I would at that point, explain that he gets that behavior from home, but I would explain to him that he is expected to follow the classroom rules because they apply to everyone and not just him. I hope that makes sense. Of corse, his mother may not have been very involved in his life. She may have been uneducated or felt she couldn't make a difference. I don't know there are a lot of possibilities.

I really disagreed with some of the things that Melvin said last night. I think that students realize after Kindergarten that there are different ways you act at home and at school. If your child is getting in trouble at school i think it is the parent's duty to explain to the child that there are different ways that you act at home and in public. Just the way you explain to them that you don't act out when you are at a resturaunt. Now i'm not trying to say that anyone's parents did a poor job raising them, it's just the way i feel on the matter.

I thought that the teachers constant calls to home were a little extreme. I would think that she should have been able to solve that situation at school, instead of calling home all the time. Another thing too, is that I would not want to keep saying that a child talks "too much". When I teach I want my children to express their thoughts and ideas, and not discourage them from doing so. I would be worried that if the little boy kept hearing that comment about himself too many times that he would soon be scared to speak out in class, and that can be damaging to them especially in a learning environment.

I think that as students we give up a lot of the things that we do at home are given up when we are in a classroom full of students. I was always the quiet person in class and I could not learn well when others yelled out answers or talked all of the time. And yes we all come from a different types of familys, but I think its is just a part of becoming a student that we learn to give up certain things. Think about it, there is one teacher and around twenty students (if your lucky) and if everyone is talking how is anything going to get accomplished? When Melvin was saying that it was part of the boy's "culture" to yell out, i really disagreed with him and if it continued I would have saw it as a behavior problem too.

We as future educators from Appalachian State University need sessions like we had on Thursday nights. This campus does not have a lot of diversity so the chances that diversity will happen in the classroom is very slim. I enjoyed Melvin and Trece's comments and were very happy they took time out of their lives to come and talk with us.
Now, as educators we do need to be aware of our student's cultural and economic differences within our classrooms. Only by being open and haveing contact with individuals will we grow and learn ways to work with heterogeneous classrooms. One point that I wanted to bring up Thursday night but did not (I taught all day and just could not talk any more) was the fact that not only can a classroom not be a cookie cutter classroom with a set of rules to blanket the diversity, but our special education programs must also not be a cookie cutter attitude. Yes, there are students that need extra help, but in addition to providing read-aloud tests, or teacher notes, or seperate room testing we must also consider the child. We MUST consider their life, their culture and their feelings. It is tough, but that is what will make an efficient teacher.