Day Three; Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

I often say "I am not a teacher.  Well not that kind of teacher.  The one with the degree.  You know what I mean."  The conundrum of  I am not a teacher but I teach.  But really aren't we all teachers?

I am in the unique position of working with students in smaller group, sometimes one-to-one.  Everyday.  Some Teachers in the classroom setting don't get that opportunity on a weekly basis.   One of my objectives in this quest for reeducation is to better myself to improve these one-to-one interactions.  When it comes to working with students of color, my interactions are stunted at best.  I often find myself floundering and leaving that interaction feeling like I failed.  Because I did fail. 
I have never really admitted to that fail before.  It is my fail and I have to remember that.

One thing that struck me listening to Mrs. Delpit's words is listening and understanding the linguistics dialect.  I am often a teacher who will stop to correct.  Especially within the teacher-student 1:1 reading exercise.  Hearing the example of provided I had an a-ha moment.  Interrupting the student negated the fluency of the reading and with that you stunt the comprehension.  I thought about my own exercise these past few weeks of taping myself reading books.  How many times did I twist words of the author.   Restructure sentences.  I read and decoded the words to form sentences that made sense to me but didn't really take away from the story.  I bet if I re-listened to myself read some of my recordings I could pick up lots of mistakes.

It's easy to pick up on those mistakes not just because I HEAR them.  I think it's because I am LISTENING for them. 

Changes to make: Allow the student to read/talk/listen.  Stop trying to 'fix' things right away.  Allow the flow to happen.  If there is a fix recognize that it doesn't have to happen in the moment; ie a reading mistake of dilect can be worked on as a writing skill.  In doing this also not 'fixing' the skill because it's wrong.  Differentiating the school/work/society culture  and appreciating cultural/heritage culture