Prompt Two Lyn Brown

Day two of tutoring, and I can see that the students in my kindergarten class have created their own little cliques and groups that they feel comfortable in. Even though the majority of the school is Hispanic, the students seem to group themselves off by what they are used to and their backgrounds, or home life. I see this a lot in the way the children who speak fluent, or close to fluent Spanish will speak with and gravitate towards one another when there is idle time between lessons. This happens even though they are all mixed up at pretty random groups at their tables around the room. And I can see that it is not that the children dislike each other for being different, they have just become closer to those who are more like them.

From my first grade classroom, i actually have an issue with two students who come to read with me outside of the class. For the most part, the first grade class is like a family and all of the children are very close and caring for one another, but the issue between "Derek" and "John" is completely opposite of the rest of the classroom. These boys do not get along because Derek clearly does not have all of the nice things the John has and does not fit in with the mainly Hispanic classroom. Nobody else seems to care, I mean they are just children. But, John likes to cause trouble and make Derek feel unwanted, with sly comments and remarks made under his breath. Derek has now become mean to many of the students that John is friends with and will swear at them, only causing himself to be in trouble with the teacher and have to sit alone in the corner of the room. Even though economically, the classroom as a whole is about the same, and the children do not live very different lives, all clearly coming from working class households.

As Brown's article described, the working class children "reveal a childhood and adolescence in which race and class privilege are givens. Even their anxieties about their class position underscore this fact, since they reflect not self-examination or cultural critique but a need to justify the prevailing concerns of the middle-class in the United States." These students have grown up focused more on their status based on their race and what their class has because growing up with out many things makes them see what they do not have. Unlike higher classes who have a lot and know very little of what it is like to want or to know what is is like to not have.

As for the boys, John and Derek, I notice that they, as well as the rest of the class pay close attention to what the their peers have and don't have, their race or ethnicity, and how they present themselves in the class, and they clearly judge them based upon those things. John has obviously decided that he is of the "better group" though and as if he is maybe of a higher class, he looks down at Derek, thinking he might be lazy or deceitful or something, just like the Acadia girls of the Brown article might see the Mansfield girls.