Sarah Strong

September 20, 2007

HTH 203

Reading Response: Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol

Reading this article helped bring to light a lot of the issues that I have been facing in my sixth grade classroom. Because of the unique situation that High Tech schools offer, I feel like each of our classrooms often has the entire spectrum of wealthy and poor and black and white children, and more! The article refers to a gap between each of these groups of students and I know that in my classroom, and I suspect in most classrooms, that gap is glaring in my face each time I walk into the room. As I read about the study done by Hart and Risley, I couldn’t help but think about two students I have who, at the age of 11, possibly have a larger vocabulary than I do. Both come from upper class homes where their fathers are engineers or physicists and seem to spend a lot of time instructing their kids at home and working hard to develop their child’s aptitude. These parents are also ones who I see regularly around school and frequently stop in to see how things are going and make sure their child is staying up on all of their work. Undoubtedly the involvement of the parents has made a major positive impact on the IQ of these kids who, while other kids are still memorizing their times tables, are thinking about proofs for the fundamental theorem of arithmetic! I notice sometimes that my language when I speak to these students is different from when I speak to other students, particularly my English Language Learners. I have been struggling with this since reading the article because I know that one of the strategies for helping ELL students is to carefully select word choice and explain unknown or more difficult words. In the article, I felt like perhaps I should not “dumb my language down” and that, in doing this, I am perpetuating the stereotype and lower expectations.

Another part of the article that particularly interested me was the discrepancy between encouragements and discouragements that children from varying backgrounds face. Again, I turn to a student in my class as an example. This student showed up to school a week late. When his mom dropped him off she told us to “skip the nice… it doesn’t work…you just have to be straight with him.” I looked at her inquisitively thinking in my head, “how will I skip the nice?” I think that all High Tech teachers, myself included, work very hard throughout the year to create a culture of respect and care that undoubtedly includes being nice! This student, throughout the first week was a handful (to say the least). Diagnosed as emotionally disturbed, he couldn’t stay in his seat, would regularly start singing loudly while I was talking, and would frequently fall out of his seat and run into walls on purpose. Although has been taking a lot of patience, my teaching partner and I have joined forces to show this kid an insane amount of kindness and patience. There were times when the entire class was getting frustrated and would speak to me either individually or even as an entire class about how frustrated they were with this student. I too felt frustrated, however I knew I needed to stick up for the unruly student and use the opportunity to discuss respect, patience, and the proper way to respond when people are getting on our nerves. Throughout the ensuing weeks, the unruly student has made many changes for the positive and I feel that this is partially due to the kindness the students and my teaching partner and I have been trying to show him. Apparently at home, the niceness is “skipped” and it seems that maybe some respect and love is a lot of what this student needs.

The final part of the article focused on various charter schools and what these schools are doing to try to overcome the gap. Many of the ideas proposed were quite interesting, however, as I read, I couldn’t help but feel like High Tech’s design principles certainly take extra special care to lessen the gap that was brought up earlier in the article. Undoubtedly there is no perfect solution, however the personalization and lack of tracking in our schools allows each student a chance to succeed. In my short time at HTM, I feel like I have seen many success stories like this.

Delpit’s article, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in educating other people’s children,”was interesting although I had a lot less association with my classroom in it. Although I enjoyed reading it, I felt unable to directly apply it to what I’m doing each day in the classroom. I couldn’t help but ponder if this was perhaps me perpetuating the issues of power that the article brought up. The one thing I took from it that was most relevant was “If you are already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier.” I thought through my many students and, at eleven years old, there are some who are definitely not accustomed to a functioning respectful classroom environment. On a daily basis I am forced to remind students that it is not appropriate to walk up and talk to me while I am addressing the class or it is not acceptable to make paper balls and throw them at your neighbor. I try to be explicit however I often struggle with singling the student out as “misbehaving” or dealing with the issue later, but when it is less fresh in their mind. This is something I am still pondering and am looking forward to discussing more in class tomorrow.

Diversity, Equity, Equality, Fairness: how are these related? What do they mean to you?

As a teacher in the HT village, diversity, equity, equality, and fairness are all issues that I deal with on a daily basis. Diversity in my classroom is having students from various racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds together. Equality is when I treat everyone in my diverse group of students exactly the same. Equity is when I attempt to give each of my students the same opportunity to succeed, even if it means spending more of my time with some students and less of my time with others. Fairness is when I am interacting with each of the students without bias or favoritism. These four terms are deeply related as equity, equality, and fairness are all ways of handling a diverse group of students. Our focus on personalization steers us away from the idea of equality however equity and fairness is something that all teachers, myself included need to work toward daily.