Sunil Santoni-de-Reddy
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Upward Bound vs. Student Teaching
Two summers working with the Upward Bound program at the University of Pennsylvania and one semester student teaching at Stockbridge Valley Central School (SVCS) have given me experiences teaching and learning from young adolescents that have shaped and will continue to shape my identity as an educator. Initially, I began student teaching expecting that it would be a completely new experience; I prematurely decided that the realities facing students in urban versus rural areas would be entirely different and would therefore set-up a unique teaching experience for me. While on the surface each group of students appears distinct, underlying everything they are students who deserve a dedicated teacher and mentor who is both understanding of their needs as learners and who will advocate for their success in the classroom and in society.
One of the first things I noticed about my students from Upward Bound and students from SVCS were the material possessions that many of them surprisingly had. Again, my misperception was that for a group of inner city kids and for a group of rural Central New York kids, costly luxury items such as iPods, high-tech professional cell phones and blackberries would not be very common things to find in the students’ backpacks. The distinction between the “haves” and “have-nots” in each placement was a shock to me. All of the students who are part of the Upward Bound program come from low-income districts and like them the students from SVCS live in a very poverty-stricken area. While I believe it is safe to say that none of the students I worked with live in large suburban-like homes, although some live in run-down apartments or trailer homes in densely populated families it is still the case that these children have material desires and somehow are able to keep up-to-date with the latest technological trends.
What was difficult was not knowing that most, if not all, of the families I came into contact with often have their financial situations at mind, but rather that many of my students work long hours after school and on weekends to help support their families and not just to earn money to buy the items mentioned above like some of their peers. During my second year with Upward Bound many of my previous summer’s students did not return and I was told it was because they had to get full-time summer work because either their parent had lost their job or because their family was falling even further below the poverty line. Similarly, this semester I came across one student who had many absences because her boss threatened she would be fired if she did not make-up a certain number of hours, another student who told me although he needed extra help he could not stay late because he had to work after school, and yet another student who I always teased about not doing his homework only later to find out from him that he spends his entire weekends working on the farm with his father.
Surely I knew these realities exist for some kids but again my surprise was at the vast differences between the living conditions of students who come from the same place and generally have all grown up living in poverty. Perhaps some parents are earning more than others, perhaps some students come from single-parent homes which makes their financial situation more strained, perhaps they have more well-off relatives who can give them more lavish gifts; whatever the case I suppose what I have learned is that the existence of the haves versus have-nots dichotomy is not restricted to the comparison of communities of different socioeconomic levels but can also be applied within one community.
My Upward Bound students were divided into tenth through twelfth grades whereas my SVCS students ranged from eighth grade to tenth grade. In both placements I expected that I would encounter students at varied math ability levels but I was disheartened to be teaching some students from each setting who had a difficult time adding and subtracting single digit numbers, some of them needing to use their fingers or a calculator to perform these simple calculations that are supposed to be learned and reinforced since elementary school. I think this is where standards come into play as necessary and appropriate. I walk into a tenth grade classroom and expect that every student should be performing at a certain level, having certain mathematical tools under their belts. Standards are set in place so that all students, generally speaking, are learning the same things at around the same time.
While it should be encouraged to surpass the standards if possible, it seems to be the case that often standards are not being met. I feel the status of the country’s education systems is failing if we have a twelfth grade student who can not perform the operation of -3 – 3, a student who was also the valedictorian of her graduating class in Philadelphia. In my SVCS classroom there was a poster on the wall that listed numbers from -20 to 20 and this poster was utilized all the time by one of my eighth grade students who referenced it every time she had to add or subtract numbers. I feel perhaps we enable students too much by having these posters available at this age level or by letting students grow accustomed to using calculators to do things they should be able to do in their heads or handwritten. We will never teach our students how to perform -3 – 3 on the spot, in front of potential employers, etc. if we just hand them a calculator and send the message that it is ok that they can not perform a subtraction problem that much younger peers can do with ease.
Another similarity between my students from the summer and this past semester is that both groups hate negative numbers and they also detest fractions. I have thus far been unsuccessful at conveying how cool fractions are to my students; I always liked fractions because I understood how much more precise they were than rounded decimals. It seems as though students prefer decimals because they are used to a calculator spitting answers out at them in decimal form. Knowing they prefer decimals, however, it is easier for me to get students to correct answers when adding decimals by asking them to add the numbers in monetary form which I suppose translates back to educational research which shows that students will learn better when posed with a real-life example that will be meaningful to them and something they have encountered several times. With both groups of students I have worked with, putting arithmetic problems into a context of adding or subtracting dollar and change amounts has never failed.
I realize how much more responsive the Upward Bound students and students at SVCS are to real world math problems which makes sense but it makes me wonder if this rings more true for some students than others. In school my peers and I learned how to manipulate numbers without needing to think about money or any other real world example. The type of instruction we received was not bad and I do not recall many students asking why the math we were doing was so important. I wonder if students from more well-to-do school districts similarly need the real world contexts to “get math.”
The teaching I did in both placements was relatively similar. The conditions under which I taught, however, were drastically different. During the summer Upward Bound program I had 5 weeks of intense quality time with my students. I was up in the morning with them starting at 7am and I did not leave their view nor did they leave mine until midnight, if not later. I know each day that I would be able to work with my students during class, during free periods that could be used as study time, and during the evening study halls in the dorm. I never had to worry about not getting to spend time with a struggling student because I lived with them in the dorm and could catch them easily. My greatest frustration student teaching was that I had no guarantee that I would be able to “catch” one of my struggling students. I was very restricted during my student teaching. The time I had available to me was class time and it seemed like even that was not a sure bet since many students were frequently absent which made it even more difficult to catch these students up when they return while also trying to consult with their struggling peers.
The study block was too short and the students who typically utilized that time were not my biggest concerns in the classroom. Although I made several attempts to request that students come in for the study block or after school, most of the time the response was that they were required to meet with their assigned study block teacher and as far as after school tutoring most of my students either had to work after school at a job or in their homes. Again, the students who came in after school were the students who were already excelling in the classroom. Thus, this was the biggest contrast between Upward Bound and student teaching. I knew I could engage my students with math during the summer every day for multiple hours if I wanted to do that whereas this semester I only ever had control of eighty minutes daily, assuming my students came to school, and this time was generally large group time versus the individualized attention I could give my Upward Bound students in the evening.
The last series of comments I would make when comparing my experiences in each setting involves the act of mentoring. In the spring of 2006 I and two other graduating seniors discovered a need for a mentorship program between Colgate and SVCS. My partners and I, working on a service learning project at the high school, spoke with many students who felt they did not have a direction in life and who expressed an interest in building relationships with college-aged students like us. After we successfully brought a group of about twenty SVCS students to Colgate and had a few social meetings with them we decided to co-found a mentorship program that was supposed to have thrived last fall. Unfortunately my co-team leaders and I did not feel as though the administration at SVCS was as supportive as they said they would be when we proposed the program. While we were able to sign-up many Colgate students to serve as mentors we only received three names of SVCS students who were interested. Ultimately the recruitment process broke down and what I have found is that mentoring often needs to take place in much subtler ways.
With my Upward Bound students I know I serve as a mentor simply by modeling good study habits, talking to my students about their lives and expressing an interest, and by asserting and reasserting messages to them that they are not failures and that I have high expectations of them that I trust they can achieve given their talents and potential to overcome many obstacles in life. I believe mentoring is something that occurs naturally between a teacher and his or her students. What I found with the SVCS students, and probably would find with my Upward Bound students if I ever approached them in the following way, is that young people, especially impoverished or disadvantaged students, should not be told that they need a mentor. While it may be true that everyone requires some sort of role model, telling a group of kids that they need to be mentored is an insulting message; the message given to the students is telling them they are at risk and this simply perpetuates feelings they may have that they are disadvantaged and can’t do anything about it without help from someone who comes off as “better than me” to the students being approached.
It was slightly easier for me to relate to my Upward Bound students and serve as a mentor to them because I went through many similar experiences that they are still living through. A lot of the racial identity issues they face I experienced when I was their age and I still face a lot of discrimination that they will continue to serve as targets for beyond their high school years. Additionally, I grew up in Philadelphia and so it was easier for them to accept me as “one of their own,” so to speak. Last, my Upward Bound students were not able to escape me and in the concentrated time we spent together they built a trust in me; during free time I was able to have many life discussions with groups of students or on a one-to-one level. In contrast, at SVCS it was a lot more difficult building relationships with the students outside of the professional, strictly math context. I did my best to let them into my life to some extent and to always inquire about their weekends, interests, and aspirations. I also attended Mathletics and other extracurricular events as much as I could.
Although many of the social interactions I had with my SVCS students often seemed cliché, I feel as though I was successful at reaching out to a handful of students who met with me privately for tutoring or who stayed after school and conversed with me while waiting for their late bus. I was able to relate to students whose parents were divorcing or fighting, students whose family members were in the hospital, and other students who were deeply interested in the race relations at their school and on a larger national level. The best way to be a mentor in both settings was first and foremost to listen, to care about the students, and to share personal experiences and thoughts as openly and honestly as possible without crossing the line of appropriateness, keeping in the back of my mind that a teacher’s students are not members of their peer group.
Despite the surface level regional differences between my Upward Bound and SVCS students, I have found that what was called of me from both groups, both directly and indirectly, was a determination and expectation that my students can and should perform as best as they can in school. I should be their resource to help them reach their own goals and their motivator to set news goals when old ones are reached. Yes, I taught math to both groups of students, but I also believe that I taught them to trust in themselves a little better and communicated to them that trusting in themselves is important, a message they often do not receive elsewhere.