prompt 4 Kozol

Prompt 4 The culturally competent teacher is aware of the diverse cultural groups represented in his/her classroom, investigates the sociocultural factors that influence student learning, and is able to integrate this knowledge into his/her teaching.

Everyone has a worldview or perspective. Everyone filters their environment through their own cultural lenses or glasses. I’m no different. I filter my service learning classroom experience through my middle class, white glasses. Not everything is different, though. We have some common experiences as well.

One point of intersection we have in common is that I have a 12 year old daughter who is in the sixth grade. I can tutor math area problems in the morning and go home and ‘tutor’ the same or similar problems at night.
Another point of intersection is common cultural interests. One girl was having difficulty with division (24 divided by 2). I noticed that she had a new moon book from the twilight series on her desk. I asked her if she saw the movie. She said yes. I asked from the scene in the movie where the principle characters were in Rome, if there were 24 vampires in Rome and half left how many vampires would you have left? She answered 12. The only reason I was able to ask such a culturally relevant question is because my 12 year old daughter begged and cajoled me into taking her to see the movie.

Still another time I was trying to impress the point that ‘practice makes perfect’. I told one of the boys that if I wanted to become good at basketball I would have to shoot 1000 freethrows. The same was true for math. In this case, I was able to use a sports analogy to make a culturally relevant point that repetition and experience were the best teachers. I knew that most 12 year old kids play sports and even some of us who are a multiple of 12 do too.
As I mentioned in prompt 1, even the physical school facilities in the suburban town where I live, seem much better than at this inner city school. Kozol talks about inadequate facilities in his article in particular and the importance of money/economics as a fundamental problem in general. He says, ”There are expensive children and there are cheap children”.

One advantage I have, as I already mentioned, is that I have a maturity that many new teachers don’t have. I’ve also had many life experiences that many beginning teachers don’t have by virtue of my (or their) place in the life span.
Of course this ‘maturity’ can also be a challenge compared to younger teachers when trying to relate to students. Another words, the younger teacher is much closer in age to the students and therefore may be able to relate to them better. This is commonly known as the generation gap. So the age difference may be a double edged sword. It potentially has both advantages and disadvantages.