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.