Urban Youth Poets: Quest for the Voice

This program is a couple of years old, but every time I come across it on TPT MN, I always try to find more. I haven't found any updated Minnesota Spoken Word Association websites, but I sent an e-mail to ask for some.

This program is really interesting though:

Poverty in the suburbs

Hamline's program has an urban focus, which is great, it is incontestable that there is great need for great teachers in the urban environments, but some of what I've been hearing has seemed to me a little bit extremist.  Maybe it's because most of my experience in the classroom has been in a suburban environment and in that environment I met so many children with so many needs.  I think all children deserve a great education whether urban or suburban or rural, whether poor or rich.

This morning I've had TPT on while I've been milling about my flat cleaning up after a fun weekend.  In one of the programs - either Almanac, To The Contrary, or Religion and Ethics - I heard a statistic that has stuck.  The statistic was that now 30% of children in poverty live in the suburbs.  70% still live in urban or rural areas, but the growing number of impoverished children living in the suburbs reflects what I've witnessed in schools I've been in.

As a student learning to be a teacher, I'm learning about how harmful it is to stereotype students based on demographics in an urban environment, but I'm not hearing a lot about how harmful it is to stereotype students based on environments (urban, rural, suburban).  I'm learning a lot about classrooms made up of diverse ethnicity but equally poor students, I haven't yet heard a lot about how to manage a classroom with students from families in both the top and lowest income brackets. 

I think it's great that some of my classmates have such great passion for urban teaching - I'm not challenging the statistics, we need a lot of great teachers there - but I am challenging some of the animosity I've felt against suburban students and the idea that they are over-privileged.  To stereotype a student based on where he/she lives is still a stereotype and as teachers, we should know better.

Classroom observation: Junior High (eek!) French

Wow, junior high is . . . busy.  Today I sat through four French classes at Stillwater Junior High.  The system is set up like this: 7^th graders choose a language and take it every other day.  8^th graders continue in that language and they take it every day for one semester.  9^th graders take the language class every day for both semesters.  The system is set up to make the public school more competitive, because then it can claim that language starts in 7^th grade, but to me it seems like a system that makes it harder for the students to learn the language.  First of all, there is less exploratory time, second of all, because of the one eighth grade semester; some kids can go 9 months without having a French class, and then have to integrate into a class where some students only went 3 months.  It requires a lot of review time.  Also, because of the different timing for each grade, the classroom is not a multi-grade environment and a student cannot get into a language after 7^th grade.

The thought that hit me hardest was: wow, there’s hardly any time.  You get the kids, have them for about an hour, and they’re gone again.  It’s really important to maximize every moment you have with your students.  Also, with 7^th graders, you’re dealing with the transition into junior high.  The 7^th graders had their first test today and one girl cried the whole period because she didn’t know a couple of the answers.

It seemed like the junior high students were going through their second round of being a toddler.  They definitely like to explore boundaries and it becomes really evident in a language classroom because the most popular answers to every question were, “Non, je deteste!” or, “Non, pas de question!” (I hate! Non, out of the question!)  Not because they actually hated hockey, but because they loved being able to say that they hated it.  In each class there was at least one wanderer – a kid who didn’t feel bound to their desk or what was being studied, he or she would spend the class time exploring the room or getting supplies to make pictures for the wall.  What seemed to be the most important for these kids was to see how much physical contact they could have with the other sex during the classroom.

I asked the French teacher about how she felt about straying from the book a little bit.  She said that when she became a French teacher she initially had all of these aspirations to integrate culture and diverse learning activities into her classroom, but the reality of teaching for her seems to be getting by with the time she has with her students.  She doesn’t feel she has enough class time or outside of class time for the cultural activities – what’s most important is that her students are prepared with the vocabulary and grammar they need to succeed at the high school level.