Oct. 17, 2014

I have been doing a lot of reading lately to figure out if teaching is really the right career path for me, including a lot in the New York Times. The article with the link at the bottom of this post is what scares me about becoming a teacher. Everything that Delpit has been speaking about in her book is really starting to open up my eyes are reach out to other resources. In the two chapters that were assigned for the week, "Cross-cultural Confessions in Teacher Assessment" and "The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse"it discusses the real life issues that Delpit ran into and a possibility of what a teacher candidate is possible of running into in their future.
The standardized tests and what they do to the students and teachers isn't fair but its the way the government tests its students. Every school, every teacher, and every student have a different teaching and learning capability then the school a town over, the teacher in the class room across the hall, or the student in the desk behind you. Everyone is different and the teachers are supposed to be teaching the students the same things so they can all pass these standardized tests. Not all students are on the same level as others and that hard for the government to help and fund. they want us all to be the perfect school with the perfect teachers and students, but in reality there is no such thing as perfect. The school in the article attached below is far from perfect they are barely keeping they school open yet they are still doing the best for their students because that's all they can do.



http://nyti.ms/1sPbohJ

Oct.3

In reading chapters four and five of Other People's Children, by Lisa Delpit I have come to think of the education system in America in a different way then before. I have learned that not all schools are like the ones we grew up in. I went  to a almost all white school from pre-k to eight grade and many of not most of those kids were very privileged. Since being at college I have really experienced such diversity, no I am not shocked about this but its just a new group of people I get to meet and learn about that I would never get at home. I defiantly agree with Deplit that the way many schools teach diversity is inappropriate. I was the only Hispanic student in my grade until I had gotten to high school and then there was maybe eight out of almost seven hundred students.  I can not recall on one memory of learning about Hispanic culture.

Before reading this section of the book I had never realized how the minority participation in teaching was diminishing.If anything that is the reason I want to become a teacher, not many minorities teach. Never growing up did I ever have a black or Hispanic teacher, it took all the way until high school for me to even have a male teacher and I went to public school my entire life.

Inside my classroom I want to inform my students of all cultures and the different types of learning styles they have I believe that it is very important for children to have background on the world they are living in.I feel more informed on what is going on in the world after reading this section of the book, it has definitely changed y mind about my career path, it makes me want to become a teacher even more. I want to educate the world on diversity if I could.

September 19, 2014

From reading the second section of Other People's Children, by Lisa Delpit, I have realized I'm ready to be a teacher. This section that we were required to read was about how the author's eyes were truly opened by traveling to Papua New Guinea and Alaska. She realized who she was and the types of emotions she felt while teaching in those schools. Delpit was used to being the other teacher at home and being in this society that she didn't know much about really opened up her eyes to a new understanding. It was also eye opening to myself as a reader and potential teacher. It was really easy for me to understand that all classrooms are the typical American class room some schools are held in the middle of the village in a "school house", some my not even be English speaking or teach English as an option. I understand that from spending a lot of time in a Hispanic house hold and even being sent to Puerto Rico for summers when I was a young child to stay with my family and learn my heritage, as soon as you step foot off of the USA it really is a whole different world ever though Puerto Rico is a US territory. Things are just different there the kids have it as an option to take English as their language to learn and study, it is not required .Before reading this section of the book I had no clue how many languages there was spoken in Papua New Guinea and how each student was still required to learn English. I am still very proud of my career path I have chosen to take, nothing can change my mind about wanting to become a teacher, if anything these stories we are reading in class are better preparing me. I believe I am ready for anything that comes my way whether it be American students having their dialect of what they believe and were taught English and having to correct it to someone not knowing a single word of English. My past and my teaches will fully prepare me for becoming a successful respected teacher no matter what part of the country I end up in.

Reflection September 5,2014

 Other People's Children by Lisa Delpit has brought multiple questions to my mind as a reader and a student studding to become an educator.I have learned from chapter one alone that some teachers still believe that black students aren't advancing with other races that teachers who don't always take that one on one time to see the students and hear their stories believe that they are going to fail or that they are falling behind compared to other students. Just as Deplit didn't understand why her black students didn't succeed, until she looked back at her past as the same with me. I was raised in a Hispanic house where we were more focused on making our house a home girls are to take care of the children and the home not worry about schooling and work. Its heart breaking when people of our kind and the way we were raised don't succeed the same way "white" children do. The "right" techniques that all the teachers that come in contact with each other want to learn is exactly how I feel as well as them. Each culture, each ethnicity, each community, we all have different approaches and methods to learning and teaching. Sometimes it takes walking into a difficult situation like it did for Lisa Delpit in the first chapter: Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator, but she saw it first had that what educators are being taught and all the  workshops they go to do not always fit into the class room. All of us as students get taught but we are teachers to, to our classmates and mostly to our teachers because they see how well we succeed and what we don't succeed in or take interest to. Only reading the first two chapters of Other People's Children has already taught me so lessons to take with me for my journey into my career.