Tutoring gets easier every time that I go. I am much more comfortable with the classroom environment and with my students, as they are with me. Compared to the horror stories I hear from fellow classmates that are tutoring in the same school, my children are very well behaved. I am in a kindergarten class and we have been working on isolation, or recognizing the first sound in a word for the past three weeks now and they seem to have mastered the skill very well. All three of the students that I work with every week are African American.

One of the first things that I noticed when I was first introduced to the classroom, aside from the fact that the majority of the class was African American, was that these children had very different sounding names then those that I was used to. Going through school with a number of children named Brittany, Michael, and Christopher, it was interesting to hear what unique names these children had. Each culture has common names that fit their heritage. If I said I had three children in my class named Juan, Jamal, and Daniel, you would probably bet that you could guess their nationality without even seeing them. I have to keep in mind that even though it is hard for me to pronounce and remember how to say some of their names, it may be just as hard for them to remember the name Grace. Another cultural barrier is the different ways of showing authority in the way that I speak to them. Lisa Delpit describes the different commands that children of different races respond to best and why. As a teacher this may pose a problem and I’m going to have to test out different ways of speaking to see which is most effective with the students I will have. Being in a classroom with a majority of African American students has made me think a lot more about people before I judge them.

Thinking back to what one of my classmates wrote in her blog about a little girl having dirty hair, my first instinct was to think what bad parents she had to allow their child to go to school like that. But when I took a step back and really thought about it, I came up with many reasons why that little girl had not had her hair washed. Also, I have observed the children in my class dancing like Beyonce and singing lyrics from rap and hip-hop songs. At first I thought it was sad that children so young were acting in such provocative and sexual ways and that it was a reflection of bad parenting. But really society is to blame. These children are like sponges taking in everything that they see and hear, they don’t really know that what they are doing may have other meanings and messages. What I realized was that most of this behavior is a reflection on society, not on the parents. Ten years ago it was little girls wanting to wear belly shirts and be like Brittany Spears, today it’s singing rap songs and dancing like Beyonce, and the cycle will only continue.