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Entry #1

Last year I was placed at a local elementary school from the University of Houston, I was there for 7 months. I was in a program called AmeriCorps and my position was a literacy tutor in that elementary school. After reading the first chapter of Black Ants and Buddhist, I couldn’t stop thinking about the student that I had that year. The text described the teacher been removed “from the ghetto (Black ants and Buddhist. p. 1)”. In my experience I was placed in a low socioeconomic community, the school had a 400 student population and the majority of students were African American followed by White and Hispanic. I knew the situations that my students were going through, some mornings they came to school the way they woke up. For breakfast they ate everything, since they were hungry. On Fridays, an organization left bags with food for the students due to the limited access that they had to it.

The teacher I was helping out would tell me about the life that the students had at home. The text also described “students come from a wide range of families ( Black ants and Buddhist. p.4)”, that was also true about my students. In their case, most did not have a father figure due to incarceration or if they had step-fathers they weren’t that supportive of the child. In my position, I felt that there was a need for students to learn how to read but there was a lack of motivation. Students had behavioral problems that prevented them from getting an education. Their behavior was learned from their environment and their environments was not the best for a seven year-old kid. In the time that I worked there I tried my best and some students learned their letter sounds which eventually helped them read. Teaching can be a challenge in some communities, but if we think critically about our teaching, we can find a way and teach the student.

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