Observation #4

So far I’ve completed a total of 27 hours observing at FAIR elementary school. My primary role has included helping students work on assignments, helping students stay focused, helping students during reading time, giving students make up spelling tests, observing students during music and art time, and a few other tasks.

FAIR Elementary is a school that has a 49% black and a 38% white student body. This is drastically different than my personal first grade experience where the vast majority of students were white.

Students are very aware of their skin color, and I think in particular in regards to their teachers and adults. At one point I had a student tell me I was white. It was almost as if she wanted to see how I would respond being confronted with that information. I’ve never heard the teacher address the racial differences. She’s a white teacher with 90% black students, and it doesn’t appear that she is connecting with their cultures outside of what she’s familiar with. There are times that it feels like she is trying to conform the students, but on a few occasions I have noticed her trying to connect in ways that they are more used to. For example, one of the sing along counting videos that the students enjoy is a kid friendly rap song that the students enjoy singing along to. It’s very clear that the students enjoy rap, because I’ve heard them singing rap songs like “Hot Cheetos and Takis” in class on several occasions. They’ve also danced in a hip hop style during times that encourage dancing. I find this interesting because the rap song the teacher plays is very basic and flashes through different images, but one is a spray painted image in the video of a white male with gold chains and baggy clothes.

Every friday there is a 3rd grade black student that comes to help students by doing a math lesson. The lessons are pretty basic, such as figuring out how many days there are until Christmas. The teacher told me that sometimes she feels like the students respect this third grade student more than they respect her. I noticed this too. He’ll wait for them to be quiet, and they’ll quiet down much quicker when he’s leading the discussion. I think skin color and being closer to their age makes him feel more relatable to the students, and as a result they look up to him and follow his instructions more consistently.

I remember one instance of a first grade romance I experienced where I noticed two students sitting next to each other often and even holding hands. They were teased often for ‘liking each other’ but it was all very innocent. As far as sexuality and gender goes, the students are all very young so this was the only thing I ever noticed relating to the issue. As with race and culture, the teacher either didn’t seem to notice or simply didn’t acknowledge it whatsoever.

I think there are subtle messages that the students are taking home from some of this unfortunately. They seem to act as though they can get away with more when there are white females in charge. I haven’t seen any white male teachers by comparison, so it’s difficult for me to comment on whether it’s race or gender specifically, but the students did obey the black woman much more than their white music instructor, as I talked about in my previous blog.