Prompt Four Dennis Carlson

No students enters the classroom without a personal history. We know this by looking in any classroom, in any school, in an any state and so on. But one of the most important things we can do with these differences is recognize that they are there and there is diversity so that we can understand what makes us all different and then, as culturally competent teachers, we must investigate the factors so we can teach our students the best way we can to suit their needs. If we go into a class and fail to see the students' sociocultural differences, along with our own, we will not be guiding the students to the best of our ability.

Being in a school in the city for this tutoring, I entered on my first day with my own thoughts on what it would be like. I had already visited schools like this for school/after school events for family members and friends, and I knew what it would be like. However, I still knew it was going to be different from the elementary school that I went to as a child; also public, but in a very suburban area. Although I thought I knew what this experience in the classroom was going to be like, I did not realize how little I really knew about what goes on in their lives.

As I said, I went to a public school in a very nice area as a child, and new very little about needing or wanting anything and not having it given to me. This was the same for the majority of the children I grew up with as we did not know what it was like to be financially unstable. Free lunch was not common, if at all some had reduced, but it always seemed to be for the kids who had many brothers and sisters. As a kid and even now, I did not see many of the people around me as those who were struggling or in need of basic things.

But as I said before, some family and friends did have such troubles, so entering this public school in the city, I thought for sure that I knew what to expect. It's a different story when I began to work directly with the students and got to know about them more and more. Free and reduced lunch, I found out, were extremely more common, and normal things at the school. In addition to that, there were students who came to school with the same clothes on two days in a row, or who did not have a backpack that even really held their things inside of it.

These students may have economic issues I do not know of, but they still quite clearly are kids just as I was and have needs, wants and expectations within their classroom. Dennis Carlson wrote an article that focused on the understanding that a child's learning is not changed or affected by his or her race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Just because a child had a different socioeconomic stand with us our other students does not mean that he/she does not want and have the right to learn just as the other students. Carlson wants us to create the type of classroom that helps every child have an active part in what they all learn.