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Classroom Reflection

Decent Essays

Entering a public school for the first time in 2002, I noticed that there were way more white faces walking the halls than any other race. I taught in a department with 14 other individuals and I was the only black and issues such as diversity and social justice were not on the agenda. Excellence was at the forefront of discussion and the expectations for students was high. I stayed in that school until I realized that the students would be fine without me. At the end of my final school year, I had acquired a position at a school that was on the news for having a gang fight in the bus parking lot, and I wondered if I was moving my career into a war zone. As I transitioned to my new job, I entered the urban school with preconceived notions. The culture made me ask the questions presented by Schramm-Pate, Lussier, and Jeffries (2008), do the people here portray this school as a place of despair or a place of tender hope? Student achievement was at an all-time low and teaching and learning was considered top notch if one could keep an administrator from managing the classroom. It was if the teachers felt that the future of the many black students in the building rested on how well the white teachers chose to manage them (Blackmon, 2008). The students in the building were experiencing several facets of oppression as examined by Young (2013). Being a high minority school, the students were powerless in the classroom and received low level experiences through direct instruction. I can remember observing a 10th grade English classroom where the teacher pulled out sentence strips to have the students put together simple and compound sentences in the hallway. Students who were one, two, and three years behind in school experienced marginalization in the classroom because the teachers and administrators felt they were of no use. One of the administrators told me in the office that there was no point in me worrying about putting students in college prep classes because the students here were not going to college. Students were not being pushed so they could see their potential and more often than not, many students saw no value in school and ended up dropping out. It was truly a place of despair and there

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