Photo courtesy Nationaal Archief
It is useful to examine the Freshman English class of XXXXXXX High School’s data on racial background, economic background, parent education level, parent occupation, and political background and district size to analyze how it is situated in the overall educational, economic and political structure of our society. The class consists of sixteen freshmen, two sophomores, and two senior exchange students (one from Brazil and one from Vietnam). All students are Caucasian except for the exchange students. According to schoolmatters.com over half of the population of the class is considered “economically disadvantaged.” Another indicator of the economic background of the class is the free and reduced lunch program. Only one out of the twenty students in the class actually pays for any portion of their lunch. The level of poverty seems to correspond to the educational level of the district. According to Census information, the district has a higher than average number of residents that have a high school diploma or its equivalency, 44% locally compared to 29% nationally, and a lower than average number of residents with a Bachelor’s degree or higher, a combined total of 9% total compared to 24% nationally. Only 3% of the working population has a professional level job, the majority work either in manufacturing or agriculture. XXXXXXX is a predominately democratic district, city-data.com showed that 86% of the population voted democrat during the Kerry/Bush presidential election. Finally, the entire high school has a total enrollment of 107 students.
The extremely small number of students enrolled in the school along with a low taxable property value severely limits the capital with which the school operates. This means that there is one teacher for each core subject and all students are limited to basic classes, for example there are no A.P or Honor’s courses and elective courses are nearly non-existent. In addition to limited classes, the school also has a limited technology budget. None of the student computers in the district have Microsoft Office installed on them. Nearly all programs are freeware only. There are two computer labs for the school district, one contains 20 computers the other contains 13 computers. These labs are shared between k-12, which makes it very difficult for teachers to plan extended computer time with the students and makes it extremely difficult to teach 21st Century Skills to the students. Such financial limitations are the first challenge to the students of this school district. They will be at a huge disadvantage to students from larger and wealthier districts that have the opportunity to work with more expensive computer programs and can spend extended time with the technology that will be the basis of future jobs.
In addition to the financial challenges, the students of the district come from families that tend to have less education and have more working-class jobs than other districts. The focus in the school tends to be on behavioral control and rule-following and mirrors the “correspondence principal.” Most of the students in the classroom are not adequately equipped to handle an open behavioral system. The classes focus on norms and expectations, a behavioral code is read over the announcements every day and heavy monitoring of these expectations is featured in the halls and in the classrooms. Despite this concentration on behavior there is still a large discipline issue. The majority of the students that are not succeeding in the classroom tend to fall into the independent and aggressive categories as pointed out in “the correspondence principal.” The only way to “fail” in the classroom is to not do the work. Students are allowed to continue working on their assignments until they have demonstrated mastery of each concept. This focus is a real challenge for teachers, for there are students that are consistent, dependable and punctual that complete assignments on time and display mastery of the concepts and therefore need to continue moving on with instruction and at the other end of the spectrum there never complete assignments on-time and tend to fall extremely far behind. The teachers are expected to keep working with these students until they display mastery of the concepts and still keep moving forward with the rest of the class. Therefore, in my classroom I have students that are still working on concepts introduced during the first few weeks of school and at the same time have students that have displayed mastery of nearly every state standard for their level. This vast difference in skill sets makes it difficult to give either track of students the emphasis they need. Most likely those student that posses the personality traits that suggest high achievement will not be able to choose the more competitive colleges because of their inability to advance and specialize within the school. The students at the other end of the spectrum have another disadvantage. They tend to come from working class and agricultural families that never needed a further education. Many of these families do not believe their children should or could attend colleges and this lack of expectation has transferred to the students.
This has forced the teachers to actually create a “hidden curriculum.” All teachers are instructed to teach and talk to each student with the assumption that every student will go to college. Teachers are asked to display college posters, where college apparel on Fridays, and talk as much about college with students as possible, to try and instill it as a necessity and a viable option to all students and counter that which is taught at home by many of the families. In addition to the idea that students expectations need to be set on higher education, my class really needs to broaden its 21st Century Skills.
If I could change one aspect of my class it would be to expand their 21st Century Skills. This would require inundating them with technology, exposing them to new cultures, teaching team-work and independent thought. This would be a major challenge. First the technology is already limited and access to it is difficult. Second, the district is predominately white and many families do nothing to discourage racism and or encourage cultural diversity. It makes it a challenge to try and teach the students that they may work with people from all around the world when their parents tend to have worked with the same population in a manufacturing or agricultural job for the whole of their lives. Third, many of the students are very uncomfortable working with anyone outside of their close friends. They shut down and become uncooperative when they are asked to work with a diverse team. Finally, many of the students are afraid to express independent thought as they have always been taught to look for the “right” answer. In addition to challenges from the students I can foresee challenges from parents.
Parents of both the high-achieving students and low-achieving students may have issues with their students being forced to work in groups that established by myself and contain diverse learning levels. Parents from high-achieving students will be worried that their students are doing all the work while the other students are getting a free ride. The low achieving students tend to be the ones most resistant to working in groups outside of their comfort zone and tend to complain to their parents about it. These parents often try to appease the student by coming to the teacher to ask the teacher if their student can be allowed to work in a group of their friends. I would want the diversity, because the high-achieving students will most likely lead teams that might have challenging subordinates and the low-achieving students can benefit from seeing positive behavior. One of the behaviors that all students need work on is time management. In order to teach 21st Century Skills I feel it is important to set deadlines and teach students to work within those time constraints. This could be the major objection by administration, if there were to be any.
Our administration is very focused on the teaching practice of standards based education and concept mastery. This predicates that a student must continue working on a concept until the student achieves mastery. Creating a project that has a deadline and is graded according to whether they achieve that deadline or not is contrary to the mastery concept. If it is a challenge the administration makes, I can always offer alternative individual projects to those students that do not feel they can meet the time constraints.
I do not feel that administration will really offer any objections, as they do encourage collaborative learning and want the students to be more in touch with 21st Century Skills. I plan to focus on this with my freshman class during a unit on “Romeo and Juliet.” I am going to have them research Elizabethan culture the English culture and explore how other cultures around the world have adopted “Romeo and Juliet.” I will begin by creating a list of research topic for small groups to explore and create movies that they will post to a website the class as a whole is going to create. The first research groups will be in fairly homogenous groups, in order to help the students become comfortable with the group work concept. The second set of research groups will be more diversified.
Mr. Pippenger 