Recap

Now that this course is nearly at an end, I have to admit that it was a useful class on the whole. The material exposed us to a wide variety of diversity issues that I otherwise would not have taken the time to stop and critically think upon, such as the extent of diversity within large groupings, such as the diversity within "Asian" americans.

After covering gender, sexuality, racial, and bullying issues, it is apparent that as teachers we need to be hyper aware of the different diversity elements at play in a situation. Without taking this course, I don't think that many of these would really be at the forefront of our thought processes when presented with them.

On top of that, it was a great experience to be able to read through the thoughts and opinions of my colleagues on many of these topics as well through this blog style format. Especially in diversity issues it is incredibly useful to have more than one viewpoint on a subject, especially when the viewpoints contradict your own. 

I enjoyed this class and the topics that it covered, the lessons will be very useful in the future.

Ableism

I read through Hehir's ableism article a few weeks back and found that the type of education that the handicapped students that were mentioned in the article seemed to mirror closely what I have read (and to a much lesser extent, seen) in regards to the teaching of English language learners (ELLs).

Instead of creating deeper connections with the content areas that are being taught, the students are being instructed in a way that overly focuses on their disability. While having English as a second language is not an actual disability, the type of instruction that the students receive tends to completely focus on that instead of trying to make the content accessible. While it is important that students develop the skills to read and write in English autonomously, I feel as though we are doing a disservice to students when we place them in science classes that uses instruction focused nearly entirely on reading comprehension. We are not helping the students gain a deeper understanding of the material, we are teaching them the skill of the English language and letting them fall behind compared to their English speaking peers.

It is equally distressing to read about this sort of thing happening to disabled students who would otherwise be able to grasp the grade level content if only the correct accommodations were made to allow it.

APIASF

A few weeks ago, I took advantage of doing the scholarship readings for the APIASF (Asian and Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund). I found the experience to be very interesting as a whole. Most of the student applications that I read stunned me with the amount of extracurricular activities these students were performing while obtaining high grade point averages. Some students were doing really high level activities, such as working on robotics, in the health care field, or making web pages for large companies or the government. I couldn't even imagine doing things like that while I was in high school.

There were a few times that I felt as though the students could have used some help to tweak their answers though. The method of scoring the questions involved a lot of reading into what hardships they have faced and how they planned to bring their goals back to helping the community. Unfortunately the essay questions themselves were split into 3 questions: "What are your goals?" "How will you serve the community?" and "What hardships have you faced?" I feel as though it would be better if they had the students write a single long essay that asks them to hit on all three of those instead of three small essays, that is still being scored on how well they hit on all three of those, but only asks for one at a time.

I also found that a lot of students didn't really pick a great person to write a letter of recommendation. For the most part, the letters I read consisted of "X is a great student, they always do their work on time and get good grades." While that is useful information, it didn't really show any connection to the student, and made it impossible for the letter to link in with what it was being scored on, such as showing why the student/community would benefit from the scholarship going to that student.

As a side oddity, the vast, vast majority of the applications I ended up reading were from females.

Stereotyping

After reading the articles for this week, I feel as though there are far too many people who need to step back and evaluate the stereotypes that we carry around with us. In many cases, they are overly generalized and when  we use them as teachers, we are causing untold amounts of damage to our students.

When reading through the politics of caring article, I found it horrible that the teacher Mr. Johnson actively said that many of his students are going to be dropouts, that they were immature, and generally knocking them down in every way possible. It is probably the worst kind of attack that a teacher can do to their students. Teachers are speaking from a position of power, and it is being abused when you talk down to students like that, who have no direct recourse to challenge what you are saying. Not only that, but doing so creates an incredibly negative atmosphere that is just not conducive to learning.

In the hardcore article, I was equally disgusted by the details of a police officer that was completely disrespectful to a kid due to his held stereotypes. Even when the kid attempted to apologize (when he had done nothing wrong) the officer continued to be disrespectful of him.

I hope that I can recognize instances where I fall into some of these patterns (we all do from time to time) so that I can correct them before they are as damaging to individuals as these two examples are.

Caring

While reading through the caring article, I found myself wondering why the article was focused specifically on the Latino population. It seems that the whole idea behind the article could be applied to all students, not specifically the Latino population.

While it is true that the minorities may run into more issues with genuinely caring teachers due to a cultural disconnect, I feel as though true care of the students is something that this article should be pushing for ALL students. It has positive effects for all students to feel as though they are cared about, and the sentiment that teachers only care about teaching is likely not only seen in the Latino population.

So while I agree with what the article is trying to get across, I just felt that it could have focused more on care overall, with some added attention to the minority populations and the challenges they face, instead of being entirely focused on them, and ignoring the majority populations in the equation. Are they feeling the same things? It's hard to tell in this article.

Masculinity

During the discussions on blackboard during week 5, there was a good deal of discussion that brought up name calling in schools. The Kimmel article, Masculinity as Homophobia explains the situation pretty well from a male perspective. Unlike women, men are held up against a perception of what is masculine. Anything that is perceived as feminine, either emotionally or physically, leads to harsh reactions from peers. As Eric pointed out, students even go as far as to cover their tracks when they do anything that may be perceived as a homosexual or feminine, as seen by the phrase "no homo."

I begin to wonder if there is anything that can really be done about this in a classroom setting. While it is possible to tell students that the language is inappropriate, it will just lead to them censoring themselves in the classroom and starting it up again once they leave. As this is more of a universal issue, I feel as though the best course of action is to avoid adding to the pressure ourselves. Students have enough to deal with from their peers and self perceptions that we should be trying to alleviate, not add to.

Unraveling...

The Unraveling the Model Minority book got me thinking about dynamics in the Asian cultures that I had not thought of before. I had honestly never thought that there were such deep and varied separations within the Asian student bodies.
While The idea that Asians would prefer to stick with their own ethnicity, such as was shown to be the case with the Korean students in the book, I never really considered that multiple other groups of "Asian" existed within the broad label. It was interesting to see that there were multiple distinct groups depending on if they identified as Asian, Asian-American, or "new wave."
In terms of teaching, the biggest concern that this book brought up to me is that if Asian students have a stereotype following them that says "you are good at school," I worry that approaching a struggling student may feel as though I think that they can perform better "because I see them as Asian" rather than believe that they as an individual can perform better. Worse, how can I get them to seek out the extra help when some are carrying the perception that needing the help in the first place is something to be ashamed of?