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Lowering the Bar- Too Nice is Dangerous

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Lowering the Bar - Being Too Nice is Dangerous  When I started teaching, I remember Teach For America expressing that lowering the bar for our students was not an option. If we lower the bar we are in fact harming our students more than helping them and playing into the systems of racism already in place. We are to hold each student to high standards and do what it takes to help them reach the bar. They then taught us how to accommodate instead of modify, they introduced scaffolding and differentiation. We learned about equal and fair classroom management. I had all the tools I needed to be a great teacher and to raise the bar and keep it raised! I loved this idea! In theory I was well equipped to take on the classroom. It sounded perfect, exactly what a mission is supposed to sound like. I was ready to dive in. But what I wasn't ready for, was myself. I had these tools but didn't understand how to use them. I knew what I should be doing (keeping the bar raised) ...
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Emergent Bilinguals

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Emergent Bilinguals  On the average day I teach 35 emergent bilingual students in my chemistry class. These resources were very refreshing because they either provided reinforcements to strategies that I am already using or they suggested a new method that I am looking forward to trying. One method I wanted to discuss a bit was the idea of creating a classroom culture that is able to acknowledge all student language identities. At my school, the larger culture is very divided. For instance we have our emergent bilingual students and then we have the "English" speaking students. The student rarely every communicate to one another and instead, stick to their groups. This larger school culture finds it's way into my classroom and battling against it is difficult and I can't say I have done a good job. My classroom does not look like the classrooms in those episodes, which is disappointing. During my first year teaching a fight broke out in my room because an em...
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Paulo Freire - Critical Pedagogy

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Critical Pedagogy The quote, "transform the curriculum so that it does not reflect biases or reinforce systems of domination", stood out to me. Up until I started teaching, I didn't realize how biased curriculum and better yet, how biased Standardized Testing could be. The SAT uses vocabulary that is biased and full of dominance. The Standards in the NGSS are also biased. The Summit Learning Platform we use is biased. All these things have been written for privileged white students, not the students I teach. I am constantly trying to find ways that my students can fit into these curriculum and systems. Shouldn't it be the other way around! Where is the curriculum for my students. When I use these biases systems, the deficit model is the outcome... which is very upsetting.. This needs to change!  Banking Education is exactly how I was taught when I was a student. Now as a teacher, I never teach the way I was taught. At first this adjustment was difficult, my ins...
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Intersectionality

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Intersectionality  The first time I heard the term intersectionality was the summer of 2016. I had just joined Teach Form America and was in Providence, Rhode Island for our summer training. We were at Brown University for a tour and our guide took time to explain a piece of art that had many lines crisscrossed over one another. Our tour guide stopped to discuss how this display was used to represent the importance of acknowledging intersectionality. Everyone around me nodding their heads in understanding. I remember thinking to myself, "what is that?...I don't know what we are talking about right now". Later that day, TFA held a diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DEI) session on intersectionality. We had several discussions about our own intersection and what that means for us as individuals. We then advanced that conversation to discuss the intersections of our potential students and what that meant for us as teachers. During this session, I realized for the 3rd...
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Ability and Disability- The Same Thing?

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Dis/Ability  I can't help but think about my own personal experiences with dis/ability while working through the readings. Here are a few questions... 1. If my teachers "re-taught" disability in my classes, would I have found myself saying things like: "I'm not stupid, I swear, I am just different"? Would I have thought differently of myself? 2. Shouldn't students with a disabilities have the chance to improve their own skills while also learning new skills - why does this topic have to be so black and white? 3. Why can't "gaps" be filled without it being seen as a disability? Everyone has their weakness? 4. Going on the question above- if its about measuring weakness, how much weakness does a person need to have to be considered disabled and who decids this? This is so backwards. 5. But then the other option is to be positive and focus on what can be done and improving those skills to help the student over come the gaps th...
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Turning Things Upside Down

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Turning Things Upside Down  While reading, "What if we Talked about Monolingual White Children the Way we Talked about Low-Income Children of Color", at first I didn't pick up on the tactic of the article, but as I read on it became very clear. The author even clearly states his intent at the end, which to me felt like a mike drop. I even wrote, "BOOM" on my paper. The author makes a great point- the fact that English improvement programs can be implemented into low-income communities with no problem at first doesn't seem  bad; but when the process is reversed and bilingual programs are implemented into white communities, there is push back. It's as though the expected norm, again, is to have communities of different cultures and races assimilate to the white English way. I feel like one could take this the next step and assume that other races and cultures have to assimilate to the American Way. And as I kept reading this article, I couldn't ...
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Power We Weren't Even Aware We Had

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Before this class I honestly never thought how the Gay Revolution and Liberation was a," symbol of a largely white, male movement that relegated people of color and women to its margins". As ignorant as it is, when I thought about LGBTQ I rarely thought about race and the effects race had on these movements and revolutions.  Only till recently have I actually been challenged to consider the effect race had on these Revolutions. About a month ago, the staff at my school was given an LGBTQ training on acceptance  and district policies. The training was helpful and informative but there was something missing. I didn't notice what was missing until the presenter said a fact about how white families are more excepting than families of other races.  That's what is missing- during this entire presentation - race was left out of the conversation!  Except for when the presenter discussed that it will be easier for white children than for children of different races . Ho...
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