Over the past few weeks in my placement I have
started to notice a lot of the cultural gaps that exist between me and my
students. I notice these gaps mostly
with their speech patterns and through their writing. The most popular gap that it took me about a
whole day of school to figure out was the phrase, “I gotta use it”. Almost all of my students use this phrase
when they are asking to go to the bathroom.
However, I had no idea at first and kept responding, “You need to use
what?”. When I would question them they
were usually really confused as to how I didn’t understand what they were
asking and would try again later or ask my MT instead. Finally one student answered me and added to
his phrase saying, “I gotta use the bathroom”. I must say I felt pretty ignorant not making
that connection at first, but really how would I have known? There are a lot of gaps between the way my
students are growing up and how I grew up as a child and I have to expect that
there are cultural things about their lives I am not accustomed to.
I
recently discovered another phrase that about five of my students used in their
writing responses to some assessments this past week. The picture book they were responding to was
about two young boys having a conflict on the playground and the phrase they
used was “he got treated”. I was
thankful that I was scoring these responses alongside my MT because as I was
about to mark them down for not identifying what the conflict was (according to
the rubric) but my mentor stopped me.
She explained that after her first year teaching at the school she
realized too that this was a common phrase the students use to express when one
person gets “mistreated” or “dissed” by another. She added that it is typically used on the
playground or in comfortable social settings.
This was a huge cultural gap in my knowledge and almost severely
affected the way I scored their assessments.
I thought they had missed the point completely when really they knew
exactly what they were saying and it was extremely applicable to the text. They had already made the connection to the
story and conveyed it while I had no idea.
This are good observations; of course, you will have to keep learning as you go, but recognizing that there is much to learn is important. It's also an important general principle - having students express themselves in their natural language or idioms, judging the meaning of their content more than the form in which they say it. This is certainly true in writing (e.g., literacy) but the broader point applies to the expression of mathematical ideas as well.
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