Going to school is one of the most important things one had to do in his/her lifetime. It’s so important in fact, that all states have laws that make it mandatory to attend school from the ages of either five or six all the way until you are sixteen or eighteen depending on the state, with it being sixteen in Ohio.
However, many people never have the opportunity to receive an equal education. In more economically disadvantage areas, students will unfortunately receive a worse education when compared to those in higher economic areas. Moreso, some families aren’t able to receive an equal education because of a language barrier.
St. Lawrence, just down the road from Elder, for example, has a minority student enrollment of 83.3 percent, and a 55.6 percent Hispanic population, indicating that a majority of students who attend speak English as a second language. When combining multiple of these hardships, the opportunity to receive a good education drops, leading to the many struggles that these teachers and students have to face every day.
Attendance and Differences in Individual Learning
At the beginning of the year, and even before that, teachers spend countless hours making curriculums and learning plans for the year so that the kids will all be on the same page in the classroom. However, due to low attendance rates and the situations that many families face, it makes it hard for the students to all be on the same page when it comes to their knowledge.
When talking to my sister who is a student-teacher at a Cincinnati Public School, she says, “It makes it hard to teach because you can be teaching the letter “A”, and the rest of the class is already through the letter “G”, and the kid is expected to be at the same spot.” She follows this up by saying, “There are more kids who have that [issue of being behind] than those who don’t, or we’ll just gain some new kids.”
A retired catholic school teacher who primarily taught seventh and eight grade for 32 years, Ms. Carol Gilligan reverberated this claim by saying, “A lot of the kids who were transferring in from other schools were coming in with 4th or 5th grade levels and trying to bring them up to where they were supposed to be was very difficult.” Once again, she then goes to state how the “absentee rate was so high in public schools,” so being able to teach [the transferred] kids became difficult because even though they were smart kids, they had never been taught how to do the material they needed to learn.
When trying to deal with some of these problems in the classroom, the teacher will have to teach three different lessons to the entire class. This becomes a problem; however, when you have to take tests because there are three different tests and it can become distracting for some of the students who are on the “higher level” because they also have to listen to the other lessons and listen to the tests being read aloud. Another hardship when dealing with individual learning is that you have different expectations for the different students in the class, but you don’t want the whole class to know.
For example, Ms. Gilligan said that when giving out an essay you would have students who wrote a traditional five paragraph essay whereas others were only writing one paragraph. It became frustrating for the new kids coming into the classes because they wanted to do well in school but had never been taught what they needed to know. She follows this up by saying the way to help with this differentiation instruction was to “constantly change.” “The easiest way to teach is to stand up in front of a class and teach, but you just can’t do that anymore.” She emphasizes the fact that it becomes hard to do this when the school puts all of the kids into one singular class.
Equality over Learning
In the classroom, it is always a good thing to have the students be on an equal playing field, but in the long run it can end up hurting the students’ abilities to learn. Because many of these schools are in lower income areas, they aren’t able to afford multiple classrooms that can teach the kids who are on a “lower level” become the students that they strive to be.
When talking with Ms. Carol Gilligan, she said her old school used to have multiple different classrooms that would have separate books and teaching styles to help the kids who were falling behind learn what the other kids were learning in their grade. However, when a new principal came around, he cut these extra classes because they were too expensive and wanted to put all of the kids together.
Even when previous students and parents who took those classes came back and told them not to cut those classes, they inevitably got cut. The reality is with many of these schools is that they don’t want the kids to be looked upon as less than the smarter students, so they put them all together which then ends up creating an even more diverse learning experience for everyone in the classroom.
Language barrier
It’s no surprise that having a common language in a school is going to make it easier to learn and be able to teach. My mother who works at the aforementioned St. Lawrence, says that it is “Hard when kids get upset because it’s hard to communicate.” The other thing,” she continued, “is that the parents who don’t speak much English don’t say much when dropping off their kids.” This, of course, makes it hard to communicate with the parents and the students when they need to be reached. Many of the teachers who work there have been practicing their Spanish speaking abilities for multiple years, but as you know it’s much easier said than done when you are trying to hold a conversation in Spanish when you don’t fully comprehend the language yourself.
This is the same for the parents who speak their native language at home because if you are not constantly around English speakers it becomes hard to fully comprehend what is trying to be said. Another thing that is so hard for these kids who are ESL (English Second Language) is that they still have to do all of the work even if they don’t understand what to do. In a recent study, only around 71 percent of ESL students graduate from high school and only about 1.4- 3 percent go on to take college entry exams.
This then poses the problem of what will these kids end up doing after high school or when they need to go out and get a job? Even before thinking about their own futures, it becomes hard for the students to build a relationship with their teachers and other classmates, making for a harder classroom environment.
The Importance of Classroom Relationships
One other forgotten aspect of a classroom setting is the relationship between everybody in that classroom. At the end of the day, all of the kids go to the same school and are in the same grade with each other, but when a school is underperforming or when it is in a disadvantaged neighborhood it becomes hard to build relationships with the students.
Many students are always absent, some students have to be taught and treated differently, and once again many students have trouble communicating because of a language barrier. But as Ms. Gilligan put it, “What you do can affect a kid forever.” Many of the students who come into these schools with lower levels of education think of themselves as worse than those kids who are smarter than them, even though that’s not the case, so it is up to the teachers to help these kids see their true potentials. Also, many of these students see the teachers more than their own parents because of work, so school becomes more of a “refuge for the kids,” as Ms. Gilligan stated.
My sister also stated that a classroom relationship is, “The most important thing because sometimes the teacher is the only trusted adult the kid has.” A student who respects their teacher, will show far better results and enjoy the class when compared to a student who has a poor relationship with their teacher and classmates. Even at more advantaged schools such as Elder, the most important thing you can have is a good relationship with the people around you. When you are able to realize that you are not alone in your struggles, that’s when you can truly develop and blossom into the person you want to be.
