In Chapter 4, Delpit talks about the importance of , and promotes the idea that teachers of "school-dependent" students must be warm demanders.  I was moved and inspired by the quote by Geneva Gay, which she includes on pgs. 83-84:
"Teachers must care so much about ethnically diverse students and their achievement that they accept nothing less than high-level success from them and work diligently to accomplish it...This is a very different conception of caring than the often-cited notion of 'gentle nurturing and altruistic concern' which can lead to benign neglect under the guise of letting students of color make their own way and move at their own pace."

Students Who Learn Differently

In chapter 5 Delpit writes about the challenges students with special needs, and varied learning needs face in urban public schools...and I will assume, schools anywhere.  She seems to point out a psychological impact to remedial classroom, classroom labels, perceptions of students and perceptions of the adult who teach students will special needs or need additional support. At our own school we are moving towards more remedial intervention courses, some of which take the place of a mainstream English classroom for some of our students.  In this move, there has been little dialogue of the impact on students, little dialogue around the perceptions they hold of themselves and that their peers formulate about them.  So the struggle: students not at grade level in need of serious help in key literacy areas who need basic support, and the question of whether or not those spaces are actually serving that need.

What are these classes actually improving and do these students lack motivation as a result of the perceptions they and peers hold around them being in the "dumb class?" How do we serve the need while also serving the child?

A Question on Possibility

At the onset of the book, Delpit talks about the idea of seeing potential in our students... in all students.  She comments on how particular to youth of color, there is a message perpetuated that these students are somehow at a deficit of "possibility" that culturally, intellectually, they are already behind.  From my experiences last year... there were definite challenges I experienced especially in seeing the "POTENTIAL" of particular students whom I was not meeting the needs of nor was I challenging or guiding them in any direction.  Our school is one where we know some of the challenges students will bring, there is a predictability of the experiences and struggles some of our students will reveal to us as they spend time in our classrooms.  


What challenges do you face to seeing this potential in our students or what do you do to see the potential in even your most challenging students?  Which youth were behind and which youth did we need to see the potential in? 




Feel free to just comment in the idea as well!!

WELCOME

Welcome to the UFSA Interrupting Inequities Book Club.