Teaching Tolerance

Multicultural Education 2120

            Personally, I will be using manipulates in my classroom all the time.  I am in a math class that shows us how to teach elementary and middle grades math.  The teacher makes sure we use manipulates every day and I have never been great at math now I understand everything much clearer because of the manipulates. I know I am a kinesthetic learner; I like to use my senses and work with my hands to figure out a problem.  I know when I am teaching these elementary students how to add and subtract integers I am going to use the manipulates for them to understand why they get the answer they do.  I know when I was being taught math my teachers gave us a rule and we memorized it and that is why we did it that way.  With the manipulates the students actually see and understand why the answer is what it is.  The Teaching Tolerance website has a lot of good magazines and books and I did find one teaching kit that I would really like to have in my future classroom.  The kit is called Starting Small and it is “designed for in-service programs, it is a training tool for early grades educators and its guided theme is peace, equity, and justice” (Teaching Tolerance, 1992). 

            In my classroom I want the children to be engaged at all times.  I had teachers who assigned book work just so we looked busy and it was absolutely miserable.  I want my children to want to learn and have fun while they are doing it.  I think this website is a great tool to find run and creative ways to engage my students and keep learning fun. 

Bibliography

Teaching Tolerance.  Southern Poverty Law Center.  1992.  http://www.tolerance.org/about

Obstacles within the Classroom

Multicultural Education 2120

           As teachers we will have students in our class who face all kinds of adversity and risks in their lives. It is our jobs as their teachers to make sure they health and taken care of.  Just a couple of risk factors they can be experiencing are individual, family, or problems within the community.  Some individual problems they could be facing is “parents lack of understanding the child’s needs, child maltreatment, substance abuse or mental health issues, parental characteristics such as young age and low education and nonbiological caregivers in the home” (CDC 2012).  Some problems a child might be facing within the home could be “social isolation, family disorganization, dissolution, violence and parenting stress, poor parent-child relationships, and negative interactions” (CDC 2012).  The last area they could be facing risks in within the community and some examples of that would be “community violence and concentrated neighborhood disadvantage like high poverty, residential instability, high unemployment rates and poor social connections” (CDC 2012). These are all just a few factors that can affect how our students grow up and act in the classroom. 

            In my opinion one issue that teachers are faced with now more than other generation is gang violence.  As a teacher you could have students involved in gangs and may not care about school work or think that it is important to get an education.  Also you could have students who are involved in different gangs and they may try to fight each other or prove which gang is the best.  Either way it is your job to be aware of the obstacles and know how to reach out to these kids even if they seem unreachable. 

Bibliography

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Violence Prevention.  April, 10,2012.

 http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childmaltreatment/riskprotectivefactors.html