Philogging Assignment #5

I find that after reading the articles on white privilege and cognitive dissonance as well as Brown's book, I am really struggling with how I will approach the issues of racial and social inequality in my classroom. With a tinge of shame I have to admit that I graduated from La Cueva High School and although my experiences as an undergrad at UNM were culturally rich, my elementary, middle, and high school experiences were much more culturally homogenous. I definitely could relate to the idea presented in the white privilege article about being informed about racism as a "bad thing" but feeling removed from the issue because I am just your average, white, non-racist, middle class person. I definitely had never consciously thought of the privileges I have been handed simply because of my skin color--some cognitive dissonance huh :)--however, upon reflecting it is very clear to me that I have benefited from the numerous unconscious advantages granted to those of white race.
I also have come to realize that for the most part my experiences as an educator up to this point have been with relatively privileged children. Before reading The Great Expectation School I thought that the school I have worked in for two years had a student population that were generally facing "obstacles". Although located on the fringe of the Northeast Heights, many of the students come from a lower socioeconomic families. Often times they were being raised by single parents or grandparents, few of their parents had any kind of secondary education and the students didn't always get the educational support they needed at home to be successful students. That being said, their situations seemed to pale in comparison to the students we met in Brown's book.
I also have to examine where I draw most of my experiences as an educator. I have been coaching swimming for almost 7 years and also swam myself throughout my childhood. Historically, swimming has been a very "white" sport. I can only name a handful of Hispanic teammates I had while I was growing up and I cannot name one single African American swimmer that competed in the state during the time period that I did. Not much has changed. The children that I coach today are overwhelmingly white and privileged. Many of them attend private schools or are home-schooled.  Their parents have enrolled them in sports because their holistic well being is a priority. However, I don't think this phenomenon is only restricted to the sport of swimming. I would argue that for the most part youth sports programs are populated with children who come from middle to upper-middle class families who are not distracted by obstacles facing lower socioeconomic families (stable employment, housing, etc.) and who also have the disposable income to afford to place their children in sports. It is unfair to say that the children who I coach everyday are there because they are lucky to have parents who care enough about them to get them to practice. Saying that children from lower SES homes have parents who care less about them, I think is an untrue blanket statement. I think it often boils down to the fact that those children's parents are struggling to meet their families basic needs and until those needs are satisfied little else can be given priority.
This is where I find myself struggling for answers. In reflecting on this week's readings and philog questions, I think I can now say that my multicultural experience is limited and that I have been socialized up until this point in a very sheltered and privileged manner. I think that understanding where my culturally diverse future students are coming from will be a continuing challenge in my teaching career.
I kept finding myself asking the question of "what is the answer?" to fixing the obviously broken P.S. 85. After finishing the book I still don't know. It is obviously a system that is broken because of inequality and disadvantage but how do you insert yourself into such a bureaucratic, hierarchical mess and effectively teach your students? Despite claiming to be result oriented, the administration of P.S. 85(and the NYC school system for that matter) really just seemed concerned with keeping their jobs. It seemed that the obvious chances to effectively service students, such as SPED referrals, were fumbled by complicated processes and an effort to maintain an certain image for the school (i.e. low referral rate). I felt that for every step of progress Mr. Brown made with his students, he ultimately took two steps backwards either because the school's administration was not supportive or because the gap between the student's home life and the social expectations they faced at school was too wide for them to navigate. How do we lessen that gap? Is being aware of the presence of that gap enough as a teacher or is there something more that could/should be done on our part to meaningfully teach our disadvantaged students? I continue to struggle with finding answers to these questions.