Finding Ways Article

As I read this article, I found myself feeling both optimistic and depressed all at once.  Over my long tenure here studying music education at UMass Lowell, I've often read about progressive methods for teaching, and the struggles teachers face in implementing these progressive techniques.  We tend to fall back to what we know and how we were taught even though we may have found it boring when we were being taught the material.  I've even caught myself doing it with my students, for which afterward I kick myself, thinking "I don't even think these students retained any of that information it was so dry..." and I teach music, a subject that is supposed to be fun and exciting!  Humans as a species are afraid of change.  This being said I was less than surprised by the challenges faced in progressing schools for the Southeast Asian population in New England.  Even still it was saddening to me that change was such a slow process for these students, despite my knowledge in that change is such a slow process not only in creating resources and programming for this population but in methodologies in teaching in general.

What I found to be optimistic however was that change was occurring and developing.  I was happy that it wasn't faltering like a lot of school programming tends to do (based on various reasons such as funding, space, and understanding from the population this programming is supposed to provide aid and resources for).  I've seen programs in the schools in which I've been working in begin to fall apart (mostly music programming, but a lot of other specialist programming was cut in the last two years there), and some of these programs (like engineering programs within schools) are ones that could potentially help a student that is struggling.  What will be next in these schools, the ESL and ELL classes?  Special Education?  As it is in the district I'm teaching in the only behavioral and emotion programming that is available is in two of the schools, and they are the schools that are known as the "trouble schools" in the district.  These students have to be driven to school in a school they aren't zoned for just because the richer schools do not want to fund such programming for students.  I do remain optimistic however that ESL and ELL classes will remain, and that these summer programs for Southeast Asian students (wherever they are located) can remain in place to help aid these students.

I definitely found this article to be an interesting and eye-opening read into Southeast Asian culture and its differences to American culture.  I also wish more schools would find ways to engage more students, rather than assuming that all students have the background in order to succeed in these schools.  From reading this article, it has been made apparent that this is not the case right now, and that things are changing awfully slowly. 

Blog #9 The Dream Keepers

Many things stood out to me while reading The Dream Keepers, but one of the biggest was the discrepancies between disciplining African American students vs. other students.  It seems strange to me that teachers would discriminate based on the color of their skin in schools like that (expecting students to not meet standards because of their ethnic background), but you definitely see it in schools even today.  The teachers in my school sometimes make comments about the Hispanic students and their behavior in terms of the cultural differences between the white students and the Hispanic students (the school I'm teaching in is 52 percent Hispanic), but from what I've noticed, the majority of the serious behavior issues in this school are from the Caucasian students.

Either way, I think that these teachers do not even realize they are holding these different cultural groups to different standards, and this topic was something I had not thought of until I was sitting down and reading this text.  What also sort of appalled me was the distinction one person made between "White backs," or students from 'good homes', and "black blacks," or students from 'bad homes'.  I think if someone is raised in a bad home they're more likely to be bad, regardless of race, and that distinction was assinine because they were only using one race to make that distinction.  It does not really have anything to do with race at all, from what I've seen.  Students from bad homes have more issues, regardless of race.  Perhaps what they're seeing is actually students in that particular district or school who are of a particular race happen to fall into a specific socioeconomic status that lends them to a "bad home," rather than it being an issue of culture or ethnicity?