Affection: A Reflection Of Racism In The Classroom

Assignment 4-Darragh Pilkington-14401248

Reflection 1: The first incident, and without doubt the most noticeable of any incident that could possibly occur in a classroom, that I was unfortunate to come across, was racism within the class. While helping out one student I overheard two boys in the class being racially abused by another boy approximately 3 years their junior. Upon hearing this I kind of panicked at first and let it slide once, thinking it was said in the heat of the moment (the boys were bickering prior to this incident). However as the incident developed, I stepped in and told the boy to stop. After telling him 2 or 3 times, he eventually stopped. This incident was later reported to the teacher supervising the class at the time.

As Glen Hansard once said, you need something to fertilise roses (in less appropriate words). In other words, when something bad happens, something good will come about and I think that was the case here as I got more experienced with how to handle a bad situation. As well as that I think it will help me improve my disciplining skills, which I was clearly lacking as I almost panicked in the situation. This also made me think about what brings about racism in the classroom and how it can be prevented. I came across a book called “Through students’ eyes: Combating Racism in United States’ schools” by Karen B. McLean Donaldson, which said “Early childhood studies indicate youngsters are generally accepting of other cultures but as they get older and are more influenced by their surroundings, they become more reluctant to

The situation saw me being assigned to a single student for the entire duration of the homework club. The reason this moment stood out to me was the students’ attitude towards wanting to do the work. The student was constantly complaining that she “didn’t know how to do it” and that “it was too hard”. This moment also made me realise that I need to work on my motivational skills, so that in the future I will have better control of my class, and that they will do the work I assign for them without any complaints. According to Geoffrey Petty on page 43 of ‘Teaching today; A practical guide’, “Motivation is regarded by experienced and inexperienced teachers alike as a prerequisite for effective learning, and the greatest challenge that many teachers face is to make their students want to learn”. This suggests that students would also benefit should my motivational skills improve because I might be able to find a way to make them more interested in the subject and enjoy it more which in turn will make them work harder at it. I also think that this experience has helped me find the balance between knowing when to push a student to do the work and knowing when to ease off, that they might be genuinely stuck. There is a bit of a fear that if you push a student when they genuinely are stuck, they will get frustrated and hate the subject as well as