Social Injustices in Milwaukee

Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in America. This greatly affects our students in MPS. When you cross a bridge and 99% of the people in e neighborhood are a minority race, you know something is wrong in this city. Students are greatly affected by this since they are with each other on a day to day basis but can live in completely different areas and live completely different lives.

While I was in Jackson, MS for a mission trip we spent a great deal of time discussing social injustices. West Jackson is a completely different place than downtown Jackson that mostly people think of. West Jackson is predominantly African American and about one out of every four houses is boarded up and abandoned. Since these people cannot afford to pay rent to the unreasonable landlords, they abandon the houses and therefore have no credit. By having no credit you cannot buy your own home, which means you have no equity. When you cannot own your own property you must continuously pay rent which is like basically flushing your money down the drain every month; your money is not going anywhere except someone else's pocket. Also, if you do not own the property reside on, you usually do not care about the upkeep of it either.

This vicious cycle that the African Americans are currently in begins with education. If you are not able to get an equal education, or do not care to since you might have much larger problems in your life, then you will not go to college and eventually get a good job. As a future educator, my job will be to empower the students to take hold of their future and realize that they have the ability to break this cycle. With a solid education, they can go anywhere that they want, but they need to be interactive and engaged in the classroom and the content. This is where the educator needs to step in and create a positive learning environment.

Tracking and Labeling Students

This week, the concept of tracking and labeling students was addressed and really stood out to me. When I see that a child has been placed in the lower track I cannot help but feel sorry for them since they will most likely never get out of that track, according to statistics. On the other hand, should we be teaching to the lowest academic level in our class? After discussing this predicament many times in my education classes, many teachers and students believe that combining different levels of student achievement promotes better learning and more socialization within the classroom. I agree that this will keep people on the same level but it seems like we are making the advanced students do the teaching for us. I know that students learn more when they try and teach it to someone else or they better wrap themselves around the concept but it still feels like the question of tracking or not tracking is hard to answer.

What is a huge problem is the fact that our tracking system has become a majority of minority students while the upper track is filled with white students. This cannot be denied or ignored any longer. Teachers need to stop giving up on students that are difficult to teach. Every student deserves an equal education to the person sitting next to them. What teachers need to do, which is obviously a difficult task, is to keep their students on a level playing field in the classroom and not to exclude any student for not being as advanced as others. I do not know exactly how to do this and create a perfect environment but I do think that is why we go to school to become teachers, to learn these kinds of techniques that are desperately needed in classrooms today, especially urban classrooms.

Supportive Methods of Teaching

After reading through Ward's "Racial Identity Formation and Transformation" I began to realize how hard it is to be not only an adolescent but an adolescent of color. You have to go through every other horrible stage any other teenager has to but you also begin to see how society really is. When children are young, they do not see color as adults do. Children openly play with each other not knowing there is anything weird or groundbreaking about what they are doing. We teach our children about colors of the rainbow and also about colors of skin. Hopefully, parents are doing this unknowingly but nevertheless it happens as we grow older. We begin to realize that hanging out with people of a different race makes people look at us a little differently. I believe that this realization comes alongside puberty during adolescence.

In our classrooms, we cannot simply celebrate race once in awhile but rather foster positive self-images of all students by teaching equally to all students. We cannot always talk just about slavery from the point of view of the white people, but we cannot also only talk about slavery from the black perspective. There needs to be a constant balance of content and discussion in the class that creates an open and welcoming environment that students feel comfortable in. I see middle school as a very important time in a child's life where they are truly coming into their own as young adults. It is very important to foster a positive self-image of themselves and their culture that they can carry with them for the rest of their life.

The PALS Program

One of the first articles I found about the topic of classroom management in a middle school setting has turned out to be one of my most interesting and most useful for my project. "The Positive Alternative Learning Supports Program: Collaborating to Improve Student Success" starts out with two very real scenarios in the classroom with "problem children." The article then goes into ways that a teacher at any experience level can handle this situation.

One of the main arguments made in this article is for the use of mentorship, whether it be another teacher, counselor, parent, or some other authority figure, that the student can check in with periodically throughout the week regarding various topics. The student can discuss their social life, homework, classroom atmosphere, or anything that they like. This is meant to keep the motivation of the student up and not solely the responsibility of the teacher. Also, by having an outside mentor, the student can feel comfortable talking about problems in the classroom that he might not want to talk about with his teacher.

The results of this program have shown great success in the classroom. By collaborating teachers, administrators, parents and students, the middle school experience can be a success. With the use of assessment along with this mentorship, attendance has gone up as well as grades. This program seems to be a success all around and an option for my classroom one day hopefully.

"Teaching" Our Kids to Grow Up

It seems as though we are gradually treating our students more and more like children rather than encouraging them to make adult decisions. Punishing students for childish behavior is a very different practice than encouraging mature behavior and decision-making. I believe that middle schools need to be teaching with the idea of critical thinking always present in the lesson plan. We need to stop handing out busy work to shut up our students and hammer straight knowledge down their throats. By doing exercises that involve discussion and critical thinking in the classroom, we will produce more independent thinkers that are more confident going into the high school realm.

The "Other" in our Classroom

The "other" is a very sensitive subject in the classroom; teachers are constantly trying to incorporate "other" ideas into the curriculum but also trying to juggle the curriculum and not cut anything important out in order to focus on the minority. Other teachers completely take out necessary information in a lesson in order to put in the two cents about the "other." As educators we need to work together to strike a balance between educating our students on what is necessary and also regularly incorporating the opinions, viewpoints, etc. of the "other" in our lesson plans. An idea for a social studies teacher would be to focus on the viewpoint of the minority in regards to Native Americans asking open ended questions to the classroom such as "how would you feel if you were kicked off of your own land," or "why do you think such atrocities were accepted during the time of the early settlers?" Small questions bring awareness without getting off topic in a lesson.

Post 2- Puberty in our Adoloscences

I believe that some things should be dealt with in the home rather than in our education system; two of those being morals and issues with puberty. I understand that a basic sex education and health class is appropriate for students but parents need to take responsibility as well and have open discussion of what sex truly is and how it can affect a relationship. Young adults need to know more than just abstinence teaching or "this is how you put on a condom" education; they need to know much more that only an open and nurturing parent-child relationship can foster.

Teens Biases in Society

After reading through Chapter 7 I realized how much teens are trully knocked down by society. They are constantly thought of as a problem and something to be worried about. The "bad eggs" are constantly punished and never really talked to it seems; they are the filth of society to some that are a complete lost cause. I believe that society as a whole needs to take different measure to mold teenagers into outstanding citizens rather than constantly watch them like hawks waiting for them to make a mistake. Just like our justice system, we should be seeing them as innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.

Confusion

Can someone let me know if this is the right place for our posts?