A Teacher’s Attempt

[Chisom Oguh]

Looking at the handout that we were given about possible conflicts between school and cultural expectations, I saw that where I am tutoring doesn’t allow for much diversity outside of the students’ control. I tutor 8th graders who go to Northfield Middle School who will most likely go on to Northfield High School to continue their education. They have classes inside of a man-made structure, so their connection to nature outside of the school is severed. Fortunately, Ms. Hebs runs her class in a way where different work styles would be encouraged (students can work on worksheets by themselves or in a group) and I believe that the school, in general, is very accommodating to all kinds of students. There is a student in the class who goes by a name that’s not listed on the attendance form and everyone in the class respects that (which is awesome).

In Chapter 4 of the online textbook, it mentioned that teachers had to be patient with their student’s learning and to work with their differences in learning to their advantage. Unfortunately, I think that teachers simply do not have the resources nor the time to do either of those things. Yes, Ms. Hebs gives her students the liberty to solve the worksheet, but she expects them to be working on it in class and have it done because there is always new content that she has to teach them. Also in the online textbook, it was mentioned that sometimes teachers contribute to the gender role differences. One instance of this that I can see in the classroom is when Ms. Hebs is being stern with male students. The issue here though is that the male students in the class seem to not focus on the worksheet more than the female students. Ms. Hebs can’t really fix this issue by herself because she needs the cooperation of the student in order to truly be effective in teaching the student.

Besides these limitations, Ms. Hebs does the best that she can to reach all of her students who need help. She encourages her students to ask questions and waits for them to complete the warm-up before continuing on with class. Even though her time with each class is short, she does the best she can to make sure that her students are in the place they need to be for the next class.

This past week, the middle school had just started a new quarter, so Ms. Hebs gave her students new seats. She still kept the same pattern of pairing male/female students together at a table (like it was mentioned in the Week 6 blog post). Of course, this means that students had new “surroundings” to adapt to but that didn’t deter them from grouping up with their friends during worksheet time. On Friday, almost half of the 1st hour class was out during worksheet time. Confused, I asked Ms. Hebs if there was a special event going on. She said that more students had decided to go down to TORCH. Before, there used to be a volunteer who would come up to their class and assist them, but they haven’t been coming up to the class recently, so the students went down instead. I thought that this was awesome because the students were taking charge of their learning by going down and getting the extra help they needed.

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