Reframing Education: From Inner-City Challenges to Academic Triumph

When I started this course, I was really confused about the various philosophies. But once I started reading the discussions, lectures, and textbook, it all started to make sense. I remember thinking about how this course was over my head. It started very confusing, but as the weeks went by, the course became very interesting and engaging.

As the course went on, I remember reading the text, and reflecting on my own education and the system I went through. I grew up in the inner city, in Sacramento, CA. Throughout my education, I attend school with friends that were worried about other societal issues outside of education. Sometimes attending class was not or top priority, as we were worried about the students or gangs that wanted to beat us up after school. Luckily, I had great teachers and

I teach math in Spanish to 5th graders. For the past four years, I have been teaching the same subject and grade level. Through the course I have learned that we are influenced by the ideologies of our principal, our curriculum and textbooks, our district, families, and the ideologies we bring to the classroom. A couple of weeks ago, we added another 5th grade classroom to reduce the size of our classes. Prior to that, we had two teachers for 68 students. We now have 3 teachers, and when we were meeting to discuss schedules and subjects to teach, I can see people’s ideologies come into play. For example, my principal wanted to create a new schedule that would allow students to have a flex day, where they would be learning a different subject from the subjects we currently teach, or use that time for tutoring. This reminded me of student centered ideology. My vice principal, on the other hand, wanted a more traditional schedule were the students did not have to transition as much and would have their core subjects taught in the same order. In my opinion, this is from a Scholar Academic