Small changes for the urban teacher

Small changes for the urban teacher

I think there are a lot of minds going to waste in our urban environments, minds that could be reinventing the world, but are, for some reason, only keeping themselves down and out of a culture that needs them. Why are there so few college bound kids graduating from our urban schools, and why are the ones who do go to college so ill-prepared when its obvious how capable they are? I claim that it is possible to change how we teach in a manner that doesn’t take more time, but yields more opportunities for the multicultural classroom to learn.

Treisman’s article was not only a big resource, but a huge inspiration for my paper and personal goals. Being from a rural community, I feel very under-educated when it comes to the urban community. He gave me a lot of information, some of which I would have assumed, but was reassured to see it in writing, and some of which I would not have thought up with on my own. Another resource I used was ‘Problems and Solutions in Urban Schools’ edited by Gwendolyn Duhon. It was a very helpful tool, and written by many different authors, which was great for getting a few different voices behind my arguments. A final resource for me was ‘Becoming a Successful Urban Teacher’ by Dave Brown. This book probably helped me more personally than specifically for this paper. I loved that it went over so many of the questions I have had and left plenty of room for personal reflection.

I would like to begin by saying that every teacher has his or her own personality, and the incorporation of that could alter some of the specifics of each of my principles,

but I do believe the general make-up of the principles to be universal. I think that the best way my principles could be summed up would be in three stages: Pre-classroom, Firstweek, and Yearlong, each having equal importance. Pre-classroom would be the most time consuming of the stages, because it involves reevaluating all of your mathematical content knowledge. I think drastic changes would occur if the teacher could spend even one week, part-time, prior to the class, reading and questioning the text book. You could familiarize yourself with every hang-up you have, working them out as you go. You could take notes of possible hang-ups the students will have and the basics they will need to overcome these.