Journal 2

On my second day at Esek Hopkins middle school I encountered a lot of difficulty is that I was in aware of. Initially when I had interviewed with The culture coordinator I was told to be in a science classroom with the science teacher in order to help them, because that teacher wasn’t the best and didn’t treat students the best. The science teacher apparently was slacking with Her lesson plans and also markings doing his work when they had done them. I was going into this classroom knowing these things so I already was trying to figure out ways to help those specific problems. What I soon found out was that the teacher was very nice but also Hiding behind the teachers union and keeping her job. The woman is old enough to retire but the union will protect her if she wants to continue teaching. As my coordinator was speaking to me about this I was already nervous because that’s not the best case scenario for every student that walks into a classroom. As soon as I walk into the classroom the students were questioning and disruptive and confused. I had walked over to the science teachers desk and explained that I was a RIC student my name was Supriya, that I was going to be her student volunteer. She was very sweet about it started thanking me alongside praising me for coming to the school, but the Students were not having it. I sat the first 15 minutes of class gazing the classroom and how the teacher spoke to the students and how the students spoke to the teacher. There was a lot of fussing around, there was a lot of back-and-forth between students the entire classroom was minority filled and there’s a white teacher teaching. As I pass around a pile of papers the science teacher had given me to pass,I asked students to look stray stop talking, stop changing seats, stop speaking poorly of the teacher to their classmates.Most of the classroom was speaking in Spanish and talking behind the teachers back, they wouldn’t stop. They growl that everything the Teacher and asked them to do,wanted to make fun of her. In his classroom there was this one girl that wouldn’t stop walking around talking to our friends, ignoring everything the teacher had said. Teacher asked her to sit at a isolated, or else she’d be sent to the main office. The students soon moved over to that desk and I walked up to her and asked her why she continues to ignore everything the teacher and I had said. She told me that she believed the teacher did not like her or her classmates because of the color of their skin. And that the teacher always picks on her when most of the time she doesn’t do anything. This is only one example but throughout the entire day I saw a lot of disrespect all along side miscommunication between teachers and students. I spent three periods with this teacher and I saw the same thing in every class, a student telling me they didn’t feel this teacher cared about them, that they never really learned anything from her.