Responsibility

I feel that as an educator I have the responsibility to know and understand other cultures. It is my job to teach students from these cultures therefore I must have a good understanding of their cultures, but I am not sure how comfortable I must be with these cultures to teach them. Understanding and being comfortable with other cultures, to me , seems quite different. I think that I want to make every effort for both students as well as their parents feel comfortable and welcome in my classroom and I want to accommodate their individual cultures, but the fact remains that I have my own culture and beliefs that make me as individual as those from cultures other than my own and you can't force anyone to be comfortable with different cultures.

Reaching Out

I think that no matter where or what situation you teach in you will have students that are either high risk, live in poverty or are ESL. This is something that any future teacher should be prepared for. As a teacher, you have a responsibility to be a positive role model for all of your students, not just the ones that are high risk, poverty or ESL. But to go beyond that, you need a way to reach out to those students that need more.

For students that live at poverty level, often their parents don't know what resources are out there or how to access those resources. As a teacher you can provide assistance in order to lead these parents in the right direction to access the resources that exist. If a student isn't eating lunch, you could send home an extra free/reduced lunch form. If a student doesn't have appropriate clothing for the weather you can have the school nurse, who usually has resources for these situations, help out. There are community services that help out with glasses for kids, medical assistance, food banks etc. It just may be that the parents don't know about them. Maybe parents don't have the skills to fill out the forms necessary...this is something that I as a teacher can help out with before or after school.

As far as ESL students go, I can try to provide an interrupter for parent teacher conferences in order to encourage parents to attend. I can translate news letters home into their native language so that parents are aware of what is going on at school. Even if you don't have a person at school who is willing to translate these news letters, you can find, online, several websites that translate words or phrases for you for free. It may take a little bit extra time on your part, but it is worth it in the end.

Student Voice

I have to say that this topic was a bit of a struggle for me. I think that students should have a larger voice in their own education. I feel that this would give many students much more ownership and even accountability for what is being expected of them. My struggle is that many of the students that choose to have this voice are the students that all ready have a voice. They are the kids that are active in many extra-curricular activities such as student council, drama, speech/debate team. The kids that really need a voice to succeed are often the kids that aren't involved in anything...they are the kids that pretend that school sucks and want to go unnoticed in classes and school. I wonder just how we can get these kids that need a voice to believe that their voice matters and counts. You can tell them until you are blue in the face, but until they see that their voice is being heard, they will never believe it. I have one of my kids (my 14 year old) that is one of those kids that has a voice. My oldest(17) is the opposite. He pretends that he doesn't care. Truly, I struggle daily with him and having him believe that he has a say and his say matters. The only thing he says is "let me drop out of school, if I have a say and it matters". How do we reach these kinds of kids? They are the ones that NEED a voice.