Response to Prompt 6 (Delpit)

When I first started tutoring in Ms. Roberts classroom it was difficult to pinpoint the linguistic differences that existed in relation to each student. As my experience in the classroom and my relationship with the students in the class progressed, I was able to grasp the differences in linguistics. Some students come from households where the primary language is spoken in Spanish and other students come from homes where African-American Vernacular is spoken. Both situations have aspects that hinder the progression of learning Standard English at school. At one end of the spectrum, some students were able to read and write with ease, while on the other end, other students had trouble sounding-out, pronouncing and writing sentences.



Ms. Roberts recognizes these sociocultural and linguistic differences amongst the students and has several techniques that she utilizes in order to provide the proper amount of help that each student requires. Ms. Roberts uses what Lisa Delpit would call a "diversity of style". She empower the students by relating the curriculum to the culture of the students, as well as allowing the students to directly participate in nearly every lesson. The last tutoring session she taught a lesson in math on the uses of graphing. She had the students build a graph, while participating as a group, that represented the favorite foods of students. The class was told to give a list of their favorite foods, and then a tally was made of the data in order to properly fill in the graph. She also uses a direct method of discipline in order to keep the attention of the students. This method of discipline seems very necessary for second grade children. Even though she demands good behavior in her class, she rewards good behavior with privileges such as longer recess or fun projects such as kite building. Group work in normal setup for most of the class time, but individual work is also applied.

It is very clear that Ms. Roberts shows great concern for the education of the students in her classroom. It is evident, not only from the statistics on Infoworks. com and the vast number of works published on the subject of the proper pedagogy for multicultural classrooms, that minority children have more difficulty in acquiring the standard of education in which white children acquire. Although this is a very general statement, there is a mass of proof in its favor. One of the methods that Ms. Roberts uses that directly addresses this issue is by allowing the help of volunteers into the classroom in order to provide her students with a better opportunity at an equal education.