School and Students
Many of my students are affected by the problems endemic to racially and economically segregated cities: poverty, violence, physical abuse, drug abuse, transience, truancy, and mental health issues. The majority of my students live in either the Hillside projects, which is primarily African American, or Southwood Apartments, which is primarily Hispanic/Latino. Most of my Hispanic/Latino students are children of immigrants, and are either already bilingual or English language learners (ELLs). My first year teaching, in 2012, I only had four Hispanic/Latino students, but the number grows every year, as the south side immigrant population continues to expand. That said, our school has been and will continue to be in a state of cultural transition. Within the school, the students have divided themselves along racial and cultural lines: the African Americans stick together, the Hispanics/Latinos stick together for the most part, and the handful of white students always seem kind of lost with no place to fit in.
I teach seventh grade, and as our school went from being under “School Improvement” to “Conditional Accreditation,” I am under a lot of pressure to keep the students reading from “bell-to-bell,” which leaves little time for creativity or quality writing. Therefore, I always hit a wall when I ask my students to write narrative. In this era of high-stakes testing, the students no longer take a writing SOL exam in fifth grade, so teachers typically do not focus on writing until the students have to take the exam in eighth grade. Prior to eighth grade, there is so much pressure to get the students to pass the reading test (and every other subject that is “officially” tested), that writing is simply pushed to the side, if even taught at all. Therefore, the majority of students simply do not know where to start writing due to pure inexperience. Furthermore, somewhere between childhood and adolescence, they seem to have misplaced their imaginative abilities and remain firmly planted in the physical and digital realities of their day-to-day lives.
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