Classroom Contextual Factors, and Students as a bonus!

I decided to toss my Students section in here just in case you all were interested. Enjoy!

Classroom:

My classroom is fairly large with 34 desks in an interesting formation, that looks like two E's facing each other on each side of the room, with some island desks in between. The students are surrounded with books, and there are 8 computers at the back of the room, though they seem to be reserved for the use of another class that sends students in to use them. There are multiple posters around the room that relate to the writing process, as well as a poster with step-by-step directions for starting class, and a poster with instructions for ending class. The document camera is up front with the Smart Board, and the projector is right up close to the Smart Board, so no one can really walk in front of it because it's up too high and cleverly angled. The feeling of the classroom is one that is hard to describe, since it combines a sense of sterility with a sense of being in a book nook, and it may account for the discomfort that some of the students seem to feel on entering the room, though I am continually intrigued by the books I walk by around the room. The 6th grade students get to use the books, so they love the space, but my 8th grade students I'll be teaching have no relationship to them, and so don't find any value in having them around the room. I've been using the document camera and the SmartBoard quite a bit when assisting with vocabulary, and I really enjoy having these tools available, unlike in my student teaching. I'll definitely be using a lot of mixed media and technology since I have the necessary tools available.

Students:

I'm teaching one of my cooperating teacher's 8th grade language arts classes. My class has 16 boys and 14 girls, though it sometimes seems to be all boys because they're so much louder. Part of my task is definitely to make the girls participate more. My class is mostly made up of white and Hispanic students, in a very even mix, with a couple of students of other ethnicities. I have six TAG students and two IEP students, though one of them is both TAG and on an IE, and requires a lot of encouragement and extra motivation because he doesn't see the point of a lot of the work we assign. I have one ELL student in my class who has been classified as a level 2, but my teacher believes he's really more of a level three, or he wouldn't be doing as well as he is in this mainstream, grade-level class. I also have two AVID students who are very well supported by the staff, including the aide we now have in my classroom who comes in specifically for them and our ELL student. I will definitely be doing a lot of differentiated instruction, as well as incorporating some of the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) elements I've learned in my ESOL class. I've decided to incorporate a lot of literacy activities and SIOP procedures because they benefit everyone, not just the students on IEPs or who are in AVID or who are English Language Learners. I also chose the book I'm doing my unit on, Tangerine, because it addresses racial and economic issues in a community and in a middle school, and I believe my students will have many insights and connections to make with the text since they are in a similar school.

Extended School Contextual Factors

Mill Stream Middle School is a Title I school that was built in 2001, so everything is still very nice and new. The use of technology in the classrooms is a huge step up from my student teaching location, as all the teachers have document cameras and Smart Boards, and there are many classroom sets of books in my supervising teacher's room. However, since they are Title I, I have to keep in mind that 73% of students are on free or reduced lunch, as the 7th grade counselor told us, so even though the school looks affluent, the students are not. The student population of Mill Stream is 51% White, 40.6% Hispanic, 2.9% Asian, 2.3% Native American, 1.6% Black, and 1.6% other (ODE website, 2009). There is a large support staff, with 4 part time counselors, a CARE team, a Youth Service Team, a Community Outreach Specialist, special education staff, ESL staff, TAG staff, and various district support personnel who come around as needed. There is a very strong network of programs to support students, such as mentoring groups, peer mediation groups, a grief counseling group, and various community building groups, so there are many places to send students with home life problems. I think this creates a very supportive environment for the students, and it creates multiple communities for the students to belong to.

However, there is an undercurrent of competition at the school that occasionally boils over into ugliness at assemblies. The Mill Stream football team was undefeated until about a week ago, so they considered themselves the top dogs in middle school football, and openly scorn all other schools and their teams. This focus on their football team means that they have no basketball, and no soccer. I have also heard from some of the teachers that they value the male sports teams, such as football and wrestling, much more than the female sports teams, such as volleyball. Actually, volleyball is the only female sport that they have, besides the cross country co-ed options. This spirit of competition is the only gimmick the administration seems to use to motivate students for activities, and I directly noticed this directly in the last assembly I attended, where they pitted the teachers against each other divided by whether they were Ducks or Beavers fans, and made them compete in a tug-of-war. After the tug-of-war, they tried to tie it to their food drive, which they have made into a competition between the grade levels. The only thing it really did was make the kids behave horribly towards each other and horribly toward the teachers, and whipped them into such a frenzy, they were almost rioting for the last ten minutes of the day. The teachers in my section don't coach any sports, so they don't feel as strongly about the sports teams, but the general aura of competitiveness of both the staff and students makes me nervous.

Contextual factors of my school

Edit: Hi, all! I wrote much more on my contextual factors, so I decided I should re-edit this entry and break my factors up into four different posts. Here's my first part still:

Mill Stream Middle School is located in Northtown, Oregon. Northtown has a population
that is 78.4% White, 12.7% Hispanic, 1.2% Asian, 1.2% Native American, and 4.9% other, and 71.4% of the population is made up of families (US Census Data, 2006), which means that a good proportion of the population is in the schools or interacting with the schools in some way. The community around Mill Stream is full of nice, newer two story houses, and the school has the feeling of a school that is located in a very nice part of town, due to how new everything still looks, and how much technology and books are in the classrooms. This means that I look at my students as having more resources, and so I am perhaps a little less sympathetic toward them than I am my students at my student teaching facility. That being said, I still have tremendous sympathy towards them just because they are middle school students, and I remember how isolated and horrible I felt in middle school, so rest assured that I still feel for them.

4.1 Reflections

Kids I find it easy to like: The kids who are eager to please, and work hard. Also, the kids who rise their hands to give answers, or ask questions, and who pay attention in class.

Kids I find it hard to like: The kids who shout out answers, or pick on and bother other kids who are doing classwork, or make racist and homophobic remarks.

Kids I am sorry for: The kids who constantly need approval, the kids who don't socialize well, and the kids who obviously have a bad home situation, or a difficult parent.

Kids I feel threatened by: The kids who are sneaky and who appear to comply, but find their own ways to not comply, and to make trouble for other people. I suppose I also feel threatened by kids who are bigger than me and who have emotional problems, but I haven't had much experience with those students, and I've never really felt personally threatened by a student, just more that my authority has been threatened.

Kids I identify with: The quiet kids who get their work done, or the kids who really understand and enjoy the subject area, or even if they don't enjoy it, they understand it well enough to get the work done. I was one of the quiet students who usually really understood the subject matter, even if I didn't speak out in class much, because I didn't want to draw attention to how much I knew.

Kids I gravitate toward: I gravitate toward those same students, the quiet ones who seems to understand and make progress, though I also gravitate toward the students who are actively involved in class, and who like to tell their answers and ask questions, and talk in class discussions.

Kids I feel inadequate around: The kids who don't know what's going on, no matter how much I explain and how many ways I explain, the kids who missed a step along the way back in grade school, or have life issues interfering with their learning, or who just can't understand what they're reading, even after exercises and groupwork, and who need intervention that I can't provide. And the kids who don't receive a lot of support at home, or have dependency issues, or have to work after school and can't come in for help, I feel that I can't do enough for any of these kids.
Kids I probably don't even notice: I hope that I notice all my students, but I suppose it would be fairly easy for a kid who was a good student and kept their head down to go unnoticed by me except when I assess and grade their work, and since they seem to be doing well on their own, I may not devote as much attention to them as to the ones clamoring for attention and help.

This reflection made me really think about the behaviors that I don't like in kids, and what I might find threatening, and I had to think about how I would deal with those students in the classroom. I realized that I'm not really afraid of upfront behavior, but more threatened by passive-aggressive behavior, and deceit, rather than temper tantrums and violent behaviors. I also had to think about the students that I might not notice, and resolve to not let there be students I don't notice.

The hardest part of this reflection was thinking about the kids I feel inadequate around, because there are so many needs I want to meet, but I do realize that I'm only one person, and I can only do so much for students, especially when I have possibly have over 120 students in one semester. I suppose the key for me is to utilize my administrative and counseling supports when I have students with lots of life issues.

A short history of discrimination in Oregon (and surrounding areas)

I couldn't schedule an interview with one of the LGBT parents in my congregation, so I decided to interview someone who was educating during the Civil Rights movement, but I couldn't find anyone who was available before this post was due. So I'm building this reflection from the information I've found on the PBS website for the “Eyes on the Prize” series. Since the educators I would have interviewed all taught in Oregon, and mostly Salem, I decided to do some research on the Civil Rights movement and history of discrimination in Oregon, because I believed that the same biases of the region would be reflected in the schools as well.

I found a timeline of black history in Oregon here, which came from this interesting conversation in a forum I found about Portland here. As a short overview, slavery was outlawed in Oregon in 1844, but the provisional government and then the territory government passed exclusion laws, which prevented people of color from settling in Oregon. Pro-slavery separatists in southern Oregon try to create a second Territory out of southern Oregon and northern California, and it's voted down in both territories, but the idea sticks around. When Oregon becomes a state, it's the first state with an exclusion law written into the constitution to join the Union. When the Civil War starts, a pro-slavery, anti-Union group called the Knights of the Golden Circle opens many chapters in Oregon communities, trying to secede and form their own Pacific Coast Republic. Luckily, the group fell apart when it became apparent that the North would win the Civil War. After the Civil War, it takes three more years for Oregon to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives citizenship to blacks. The Portland chapter of the NAACP is formed in 1914, and in 1926, Oregon finally amends its constitution and removes the exclusion law from its state Bill of Rights. However, it took until 1951 for Oregon to repeal the law prohibiting interracial marriages, and until 1959 for Oregon to actually ratify the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Even after all the reforms were made, many towns in Oregon were 'sundown' towns, or had sundown laws written into their town laws, until relatively late, such as the mid '60s in Medford. I found this link with interviews about prejudice in Medford and the existence of sundown laws here. In case you're wondering what I mean by sundown towns, a sundown town is a town that is purposely all white, and the name came from the signs they post around town that tell people of color that they must leave town by sundown.

In relation to sundown towns, I learned a little more about the state of Jefferson, which is what the pro-slavery secessionist movement morphed into in southern Oregon and northern California. These citizens, instead of seceding, now wanted to form a new state, combining the bottom part of Oregon with the top of California, with Yreka as the capitol, and they called it the state of Jefferson. The movement was reaching a head in November of 1941, with the Jefferson Citizens Committee, as they called themselves, were in 'patriotic rebellion,' stopping traffic along Highway 99 outside of Yreka to protest their own lack of sufficient roads from the state government. However, the rebellion dissipated quickly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that December, and the citizens went to work for the war effort. However, they still had ties to the mindset of the Confederacy, because there are several markers (seen here) along the old highway 99 placed by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1944 which memorialize 99 as Jefferson Davis Highway No. 99, Jefferson Davis being the president of the Confederacy. The movement is still around in spirit, and their home page is here.

I also examined the history of the little town of Dallas as a hotbed of KKK activity. However, it appears that the years the KKK was strong were from 1921 to 1924, and they basically lost power in the area after their candidates didn't win the election. This article from the Dallas Historical Society gives a short overview of the history of the KKK in Dallas, this article dives into the history a bit deeper, and this article from WillametteLive discusses the perpetuation of the rumors of an active KKK in Dallas, which is interesting because some of the students who attend Dallas High School report the rumors they've heard, and one of the local historians, Arlie Holt, had to come and give a talk to the students because most of them believed the KKK was still active in the area. Most of them believed it because the Dallas High School mascot is the Dragons, though Holt investigates and finds that the mascot choice had nothing to do with the Klan. I found this really interesting, because I have a friend from OSU who went to Dallas High School, and she was convinced that the reason they were called the Dragons was because it was left over from the history of the Klan in the area, and she reported how there was only one black family in town when she attended high school there, and that people didn't treat them very well. That made me think of my own experience living briefly in Joseph, Oregon, and how my manager at the soda shop called a black girl who came through one day 'that colored girl,' and how shocking his ignorance was to me, in that he thought that was an appropriate term.

As a counterbalance to this history of racism in Oregon, Brad Avakian, who is the Labor Commissioner of Oregon, has established the Oregon Council on Civil Rights to work with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, because, as he says here, “There is a need for a greater effort to address the causes and effects of discrimination in Oregon.” Since the government is openly acknowledging that we do still have issues of discrimination in Oregon, even after the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, then I feel hopeful that perhaps these issues can finally be addressed and solved. Otherwise, the only way to combat discrimination is to constantly educate each other about prejudice, and attempting to combat prejudice wherever we find it, while understanding the history behind it here in our towns.

Different ideas of achievement

As a teacher, I view achievement on many different levels. I suppose one dimension of achievement is having all my students meet the standards for the state, or the district, but even though that is the most important achievement to the administrators, and the district, I don't think it would be the most important achievement to me. It would perhaps become the most important achievement if my salary depended on it, but I hope it would never come to that.
Another dimension of achievement is, for me, getting my students to actually comprehend the texts that we are discussing. Anyone can make them read them, but if they can really take what they've read, and internalize it, and then be able to analyze and remember it, then that is a true achievement.
One more dimension of achievement, that is not necessarily one for me, but it bears remembering for me since it applies to my students at McKay, is graduating high school. For a lot of the kids I will be having in my class, getting through to their senior year and graduating is a huge achievement, and it really shouldn't be discounted.

My really long autobiography

I’m going to start off by warning you all that over my life, I have become very liberal. Very, very liberal. This autobiography may become painful for you if you are more conservative, but hopefully it will describe for you how I reached my current mix of cynicism and idealism about our world and our educational system.

I am white. White, white, white, burning after 10 minutes in the sun white, though that may also be part of my red-headed complexion. My family is a mix of Scots, Germans, some small bit of Irish, and some smaller bit of Danish. Drinkers, not tanners. My family has also lived in Oregon for a long time, as my father says he can trace one of my great-great-grandmothers back to Medford, where she arrived from traveling on the Oregon Trail, though it was apparently the longer version that skipped through Oregon City and the Willamette Valley.

I grew up mostly here in Salem, where I lived in the suburbs in very white neighborhoods, and I attended Sprague High School, the least diverse high school in Salem. My mother is an elementary school teacher, and my father is a United Methodist pastor. My parents got a divorce when my father was getting his Doctorate of Divinity down at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, which occurred when I was 10, and my little sister was 5, and the consequences of the divorce resonate in our lives even now. After the divorce, we saw our father over in Eastern Oregon every summer for one month until I turned 18. When I was 13, his girlfriend became pregnant, so she became our stepmom, and my adorable half-sister Dawn-Hunter was born soon after. When Dawn-Hunter was 8, her mother and my father got a divorce, and my ex-stepmom has recently relocated herself and 12-year-old Dawn-Hunter across the country to Tennessee. So, I essentially grew up with a single mom, and I formed my opinions and thoughts about my gender identity as a woman who needed to have a career, and needed to be able to support herself on all levels.

I suppose my social class background is middle class, though I believe it can be considered that way more because of the levels of education of my parents, since my mom has her Masters, and my father has his Ph.d, than any amount of money they made at the time I was growing up. In fact, I remember being so ashamed the second summer I went to visit my father after the divorce, at the tiny house he was renting with his girlfriend in Oakland, because we had to use food stamps at the grocery store. My father also insisted strangely on buying only powdered milk, which means that to this day I can’t drink any form of powdered drink if it’s cold, because of the associations, as well as the nasty taste. He went back to being a pastor after Dawn-Hunter was born, but was placed continuously out in Eastern Oregon in positions that continually became half-time due to the dwindling, elderly congregations, and left him unable to support many people other than the three he had living in his immediate household.

Religion has, of course, been a huge influence on my life, since it’s very hard to escape it when your father is a pastor, and your whole family is active in a church community. I grew up attending Morningside United Methodist, a fairly small church that was founded in the late ‘50s by a group of teachers, and my mother grew up attending this church, meaning that I am the third generation of my family present whenever I visit the church. Morningside is unique in that it houses a very liberal group of people, and they were one of the first churches in the Salem area to become a Reconciling Congregation back in the ‘90s, which means that they welcome gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, and individuals of all genders in between. They’re all very interested in issues of social justice and outreach, and when I was in the youth group there, we went on a mission trip every single year, non-proselytizing, and continuously performed community service. I grew up with our Vision of Faith memorized: “We are all God’s people! We are called by Christ to ministries of love, justice, and reconciliation, to our church, community, and world.” I have gradually become less religious, and much more of an Existentialist throughout the years, but I have internalized these values to my core, and I always look at the world through a lens of social justice.

Race has always been a hard issue for me, mostly because of my lack of experiences with people from other cultures. When I visited my dad down in Oakland one summer, when I was 11, he took us one Sunday to a church full of black people. We were the only white people there, and I had learned enough history at that point that I felt horrible the entire time I was there, and I felt like they all hated me, or they should, because of slavery, and the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. I had brought candy with me in one of my pockets, for me and my sister to eat later, and I felt that it was important to give a piece to each kid during the children’s sermon, to show that I wanted to be friends. They all just stared at me silently, and only the adults talked to me at the coffee hour, though I was very shy anyway, so I didn’t say much back. My father seemed oblivious to my discomfort, and being 11, I wasn’t comfortable asking about race issues.

One of my worst cultural experiences was on a mission trip my youth group took when I was 17, down to a children’s home in Chiapas, Mexico. It was 90% humidity down there, and very, very warm, with a monsoon-like rain at 2:00 in the afternoon every day, which cooled our compound down for around 20 minutes. The boys were put in a nice room with a bathroom in it, a bathroom that had their own flush toilet, and their own shower. Us girls were put farther away in the home’s compound, and given the old boy’s large bathroom, with toilets that we had to flush with buckets, and showers that were only warm if you waited until the afternoon for a shower, because the sun would heat the water in the tank. Those of us who were female had to wear either pants or very long skirts into town, simply because we were the only white people in the area, and we didn’t want to seem immodest, though all the girls in town wore tank tops and tiny shorts. Groups of men, both students, and old, old men, would whistle at us regardless of what we wore, simply because we were white girls, and women would come up in the market and touch our hair. Obviously, we weren’t in a very touristy area, but groups from churches came through a lot to visit this children’s home. Another thing that upset me was that only the boys were allowed to paint, because it was considered a man’s job, while we girls were only allowed to plant and cook. After painting houses and kitchens and signs on so many other mission trips, I wanted to tell the owner of the home where he could shove his macho culture and outdated ideas. I wanted to forge a path of equality for the women of the village, though the only thing the girls were interested in at the home were the telenovelas, or soap operas, that they watched every night on their one TV.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable being a tourist in colonized areas like Mexico, too, because I feel guilty about having the people, who have been oppressed for centuries, and are still mostly oppressed, serve me, a white person, and have different prices for me because I am a white person. One of my big interests after becoming an English major was finding post-colonial literature, or literature that was written by people who come from colonized countries, or countries that used to be part of imperial colonies, or are still part of those empires. I have to admit, I find a little bit of pleasure in the idea that the countries that went out and colonized are now experiencing reverse colonization, where the people from the lands they conquered come and settle in the lands of their conquerors, like the influx of Indians and Pakistanis into Great Britain, and Algerians into France. I’m very interested in race relations in this country and around the world, and I try not to make stereotypes, though I have more trouble when dealing with cultures that subscribe to much more strict gender roles, which really is almost all of them outside of our Western sphere of experience.

Gender is another huge issue for me. Since I grew up surrounded by a vast continuum of gender identities and gender roles, my own definitions of gender are very fluid. My mother was the provider and disciplinarian in my household, and my grandmother in Salem served as a second mother, so I grew up seeing women doing everything, for the most part. My father is much more interested in gourmet cooking than my mother, so I learned more about cooking from my father, and more about budgeting and taking care of my car from my mother. The only wedding I attended in high school that I really cried at, and was moved by, was the wedding of two women from my church, who had been together for as long as I had been attending Morningside, so since I was 5 years old. Their relationship is much more a model for my relationships than many of the heterosexual marriages I’ve seen, like those in my family, mostly because of the nature of equality in their marriage, and their ability to communicate and stay interested in and committed to each other over the years. Their wedding was also technically not sanctioned in our church, since the greater United Methodist conference is much more conservative about these issues, so it had to be a secret wedding with only close friends, and no one can tell the conference that the pastor performed it, because she could lose her ordination. Of course, this informed my sense of justice, and I continue to fight for gay rights wherever I can.

Feminism, which to me means both men’s and women’s rights, has also always been a big issue for me, ever since I was a little girl attending preschool, and was continuously told by the boys that I couldn’t play with them because I was a girl. I was always good at math and science, at least until I reached Calculus, and part of my identity was built around trying to become a strong woman in science, though I eventually gave that up for my love of English and the humanities, and the fact that I’m really bad at lab work. One issue that I’ve become interested in now is the achievement gap between girls and boys in secondary education, and I’m continually trying to imagine ways that I can try to engage young men in my classroom, as well as support the young women in using feminist texts, and find fiction that interests and applies to each group and their own issues.

Now that I’ve gone on for so long about myself, and bared some of the dark secrets of my white, privileged soul, I will stop, and start preparing myself to enter McKay, the most diverse, and apparently dangerous, of the Salem-Keizer high schools. If I can make it there, with all of my cultural inexperience, then I can make it pretty much anywhere.