First Winooski High School Placement

Today was my first day of my Math/Education placement through Saint Mikes at Winooski High School in Colchester, VT. I was amazed at how much diversity this school has after being raised in a predominantly white town growing up. My first day was a little hectic. The teacher struggled with keeping the students calm, quiet, and focused. Most students were constantly walking around the room and interrupting the teacher. The teacher handled every situation with kindness and patience, but I have never seen a group of sixth grade kids with this much energy! Once I adjusted and had a handle on the attitudes and relationships in the classroom, it was time for me to start helping. The teacher instructed her students to do their math packets where they were converting fractions to percents, and to ask two friends before asking any adult. The first student I helped was a young boy who was very talkative and uninterested in the education aspect of school. I went over and asked if he understood the problem that he was on, and he told me that he needed help. I took him through basic steps of converting fractions to decimals while pausing to ask him questions to ensure his understanding. I discusses things such as converting the denominator to one hundred to make the percent conversion easier, to then multiply the same number into the numerator, and then take the numerator and write it as a percent. I was amazed at how poorly this class was performing on the percents, some students did not even know how to do longer multiplication problems.

I was shocked at how my involvement with this boy completely changed his attitude. He became focused, quiet, even asking me to sit next to him in his next class. He got up without asking and got scratch paper to do some longer multiplication problems on the side. He even got some of his talkative friends to focus on their work. It is amazing the impact that I can have as a young adult on adolescents. Showing genuine time and care for this boy’s education made him invested, intrigued, and focused. It also makes me realize just how important and crucial for understanding that one-on-one teaching can be for some students. The students seem to enjoy having some college students helping them out, and I enjoyed spending time with these kids and seeing their mathematical skills develop.

This experience helped remind me and solidify that I want to be a teacher! I believe under-education to be the leading issue in our country at this time. Many conflicts can/could have been avoided if people were more educated in this country. I have been contemplating definitively going into teaching after college, but this experience made me realize the impact that I can have on young adults due to the resources that I have been privileged with. Constructively teaching our youth is crucial to fostering a great society, and I cannot wait to have more impacts on more kids in the future.

Danger of a Single Story

Danger of a Single Story

https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg 

Applications to Teaching:

• How vulnerable children are in reading a story (she wrote stories about a culture that she did not understand)
• Wrote about the white culture that is present in all of the “classics”
• When she read the African books, she finally realized that she did not have a single story to write anymore
• Do not portray any nation, territory, or individual with bias
• This is much easier said than done, we must also transcend this even into the genres of novels that we read
• Question everything and encourage my students to question everything in order for knowledge to prosper
• Work hard to keep stereotypes out of the classroom, to the extent that some common sayings include stereotypes and I should avoid using them
• Even if my field is in math, always integrate culture into the classroom as a way to foster accepting, diligent, kind, and worldly students

How to Become a Better Student:

• Never judge a person or other student based solely on their backgrounds, cultures, and most definitely rumors
• “She felt sorry for me before she saw me”
• “My roommate had a single story of Africa”
• “I did not think of myself as an African until I moved to America”
• “The character’s were too much like him, an educated and middle class man… they were not starving…”
• “Immigration became synonymous with Mexicans”
• Until she visited and became overwhelmed with shame due to her over-submergence to the media labeling Mexicans as criminals
• Showing and reading news about people as one thing and only one thing is never the right way to judge a person, it never truly crossed my mind that Africa was anything other than impoverished, and it saddens me to feel this way
• The noun that means “to be greater than one another” in her native language discusses how power overtakes the political system and further “brainwashes” others to start with the arrows of the Native Americans and not the invasion of the British
• It is so easy to be brainwashed and coerced into believing things, prompting me to always ask questions, “question everything” to promote further knowledge
• Never stereotype! It makes you ignorant, close-minded, and it robs other people’s of their dignity, emphasizing how others are different even when they are very similar