A Class Divided

I just happened to be going through my hotmail email inbox this week and I came across something extremely fitting for my final prof blog of the term. I usually keep pretty well on top of my emails, but every now and then there's an email that looks interesting enough to keep, but I don't necessarily have enough time to look at it at the moment, so I keep it as "unread" in my inbox. But eventually, after other important emails start piling up, the unread emails slowly get pushed further back in the logs and are forgotten. I'd become pretty accustomed to the fact that when my inbox said "7 new emails", it really meant "1 new email" because the other 6 were old unread emails that I told myself I'd read one day. 

Well, yesterday was that day.

The email was from my mother, who had just completed some sensitivity training at her new place of work. She obviously knew that I was in school to be a teacher, and figured I would be interested in some of the material that they had gone over in their meeting -- and she was right. The study was done in 1968, in a grade 3 classroom shortly after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in an American school where racism was still very much alive. The teacher in the film, Jane Elliot, decided to take matters into her own hands, and to run a social experiment on her grade 3 students. The results are astounding. She begins the class by asking her students "do you know what it feels like to be made fun of because of the colour of your skin?". Most students reply that they think they DO know what it feels like, to which Miss Elliot made them question their statement. She begins a daring experiment for the time period, where she makes her students believe that blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. She uses facts about the students to 'prove' her point, and gives the blue-eyed children special privileges. I won't go on and explain the entire study, but the point is that the students became discriminating, bullying, "vicious little third graders".  This isn't unlike the situation we simulated last week in class, when I had to try and read the jumbled article from the perspective of a student with a language learning disability. I didn't understand what it felt like to have a reading difficulty/learning disability until I was put in that situation and found myself hiding from the prof's eyes and thinking "please don't choose me". I think it's SO important for teachers be aware of what it feels like to be discriminated against, so that they can work even harder to advocate against it.

Here is the link to the video I was talking about above:

A Class Divided (Link)

It's scary to think the students were so easily manipulated, and I think it really brings to light the power of authority figures. Parents, teachers, elder siblings and older students really are idolized by younger students. That is why it is so important for teachers to be sensitive to racial and cultural differences in the classroom, and to be accepting of all students.  If a child sees a teacher choosing favourites or picking on a certain group, the students think that this behaviour is acceptable.  

I have an experience from my first year practicum that has really stuck with me, in a negative way. I was put in a grade 3 classroom with the same teacher who taught me at that age. It was interesting at first to be in the same classroom, but in a totally different role. Things went pretty smoothly until one day, a little boy came up to her and showed her the new clothes he got for his doll. She promptly told him to put it away, and later confided in me that she wanted him to put it away as soon as possible so that he would avoid ridicule from other students. She made it clear that she was concerned that the boy was gay and that he would be persecuted by his peers for it. She said "I won't let him put himself in that position". 

I was shocked. I honestly didn't (and don't) know what to say. First of all, I think it's horrible to ever encourage a child to hide who they are, unless it is harmful to someone else by being so.  Secondly, the fact that she assumed that, if he was gay, that he would be ridiculed by his peers, says a lot about the lack of tolerance education in schools. If there is no trust in students to be tolerant of their peers regardless of age, sex, gender, culture, race, religion, etc, then there is something wrong with the way children are being taught. 

I have always maintained that I will be encouraging tolerance in my classroom at the high school level, but I feel that if this isn't instilled in students at en even younger age, it will be much harder to form then.  Teaching acceptance in the classroom has to be a joint effort by all teachers of all grades - not just a select few. I can say that whole-heartedly, I hope that this is something that is implemented with greater efficiency and greater understanding in the future.

Doy noha vedy sxelsia?

Can you really imagine what it would be like to have dyslexia? Or perhaps dispraxia? Or for that matter, any other kind of language incompetency? I can imagine. Because, in fact, today, I had one.

In today's class reading exercise, I was one of the few who were given an incorrect version of the reading - some letters were upside down or backwards, so b's, p's, d's and q's were easily confused; some words didn't have spaces between them, or the spaces were in the wrong places...and all in all, it was very difficult to read. I tried my best to decipher what was going on and make sense of the reading, but my brain had a hard time getting around the oddly-paired consonants and vowels.  Greg was the first one to get picked on, and I tried to follow as he struggled to read his paper, which I'm guessing was just like mine. What caught me off-guard in our little role-playing game was when he was told to "try harder" and "concentrate more". He was scolded for trying his best and, frankly, he was doing a better job than I would have done. I found myself thinking 'please don't pick me, please don't pick me, PLEASE don't pick me' and tried to look away so I wouldn't be chosen to read next.

In retrospect, it was good to know what it feels like to be centred out.  It's good to know the pit-in-your-stomach feeling, and to be aware of the anxiety that picking on a student with a LD can cause, so that it can be avoided. 

Another interesting fact brought up today was that learning disabilities shouldn't be viewed as a bad thing.  Learning disabilities are not the fault of the student or the teachers, and in my opinion, should be viewed as a challenge and an opportunity for improvement as a teacher. Accommodating students with learning disabilities also gives us the chance to practice differentiated instruction and to explore possible modifications in the class.  Learning disabilities, therefore, should be embraced, not shyed away from.  By doing this, hopefully the students will feel less alienated and more included in the class setting. Inclusion is very important, as it makes students feel comfortable and as if they are contributing to a term. In addition, for some of these students, the classroom 'team' is the only peer group they are involved in, so it's very important to foster a healthy, inclusive classroom.