Frames of Reference

On a typical Saturday morning you will find me in a classroom at Rutgers University teaching a classroom full of New Brunswick High School students. I am helping them get ready for their upcoming Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT’s). One Saturday in particular will always stick in my mind. A female student came up to me and complained of headaches and a feeling of faintness. I immediately contacted the program director and we were urging the student to seek medical attention. Sounds easy, right? The student refused and said that she would be fine. But we insisted. There was a reason she was refusing to be taken to a hospital. Her family did not have health insurance. One of the other female teachers ended up taking her to a free clinic on campus and everything turned out fine. But this really hit me hard. What if she was not at our program when this happened? I could not imagine being a teenager and having to deal with issues such as these.
I grew up in a small town called West Deptford, which is located in South Jersey. My family did not have much money but by no means were we poor. I went to a typical suburban high school that was fairly uneventful. My biggest problem always seemed to be what I was doing the next weekend. We were offered many AP courses and after putting in some effort and getting good grades it was very easy for me to get into college. If I got sick I would go to the doctor and not even think twice about it. I knew it was not like this everywhere but had no idea as to what scale things were different.
West Deptford is a suburb of Philadelphia and Camden. I watched the news and knew that things were very different in these two places. It seemed like every night there was a murder or a fire that took lives. Now that I am older I am starting to put everything together and can see many issues that our urban students must face. I think about going to a high school where in the course of four years you have many classmates that either drop out or die. In many cases both happen. This leads to pressures to join gangs in order to stay alive. It must be very hard to teach students fundamentals that can help them for life when they don’t see their life going past high school.
My brother worked at a learning center in Philadelphia for a couple of years. He would tell me how students would come in for tutoring and they would not have their textbook. My initial thought was that they were typical teenagers and forgot to bring their textbook. This sadly was not the case as they did not even have a textbook. In a class of thirty there were only 10 textbooks. It was not the students turn to take the book home that night. This sounded awful to me. Underfunding is a big deal in urban schools. It could be a lack of money or as I have heard recently, spending the money on the wrong things. Having the right materials and enough of them is very important in teaching. This is another example of something that hinders their ability to get a good education.
Another major issue is overcrowding. There are not enough teachers that want to teach in urban schools. This is very obvious to me because of the program I am currently in. I am a Prudential Scholar and after I finish graduate school I will teach in Newark for three years. This program is allowing me to go to graduate school for free. I want to teach in the inner city for many more reasons than this but it is a nice perk. The fact that many urban areas have programs like these just goes to show that there are not enough teachers in these schools.
I worked in high school as I can guess that most others did also. But I worked to have some spending money and to help pay for college. In my Saturday program I see many of my students working for a very different reason. They are helping to support their family. If my grades slipped while in high school my parents would have either made me quit my job or cut back my hours in order to get my studying done. This is not an option if your paycheck helps put food on the table for your family. So the grades will continue to suffer. This could lead to dropping out altogether.
It seems as though students in urban areas deal with very different issues than most understand and this can hinder their ability to achieve well in the classroom. I think that I need to really understand these obstacles in greater depth. When coming up with lesson plans I will need to understand each of my students and the issues they deal with on a daily basis outside of my classroom. Collectively the teachers in the school all need to work together to make an environment where the students feel comfortable and can voice their opinions. I want to become a teacher that can have an impact on the students. I know I cannot change these issues but I can help the students deal with them. I want to create a classroom that has a positive environment. No matter how stressed they are with their lives they can always feel comfortable in my classroom. I look forward to actually being in an urban classroom on a daily basis.
Looking back at my experiences in suburban schools as a student and my limited experience with urban students has led to many questions. I want to know what other issues these students have to deal with. What are different ways to deal with these concerns? What can be done to fix these problems? How do I push the students to learn all that they can without pushing away?