Cultural Diversity: a response to prompt #2

In accordance to infoworks.ride.ri.gov, my school that I am working at is made up of 583 students.  Those students are predominately made up of Hispanic children.  The hispanic percantange at the school is 43%.  The rest of the students at the school come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Those students are 26% African American, 21% white, 5% Asian, 3% muti-racial and 2% Native American.  More specifically, looking at the second graders I am tutoring it seems like they are actually mostly African American and there are only 1 or 2 white students in the classroom.

Interacting with all of the students of different race, I feel that I don't see much of a difference when working with white students and African American students.  They are all extremely excited when the walk into school and find me in their classroom. They all scream, "Yes, Miss. Brittany's here!"  With the diversity in the classroom I feel the students are able to accept everybody no matter the background.  I do feel however because of the diverse backgrounds of the individual students that it allows the students to bring unique stories and opinions versus a classroom that was predominately a single race.  This may allow in the future for overall acceptance in society and in the business world.



On a side note an interesting moment happened in the classroom today.  The teacher was in a meeting with a parent that was running late. So there was a fill-in teacher until the 2nd grade teacher could return.  The class was supposed to be reading silently and this one boy who usually seems to be bouncing around was of course bouncing around the room.  I felt he just needed some one-on-one attention to get him focused.  So I decided to go over to the boy and say, "hey lets go read this story together over there."  He was very excited to read together.  While he was picking out a book, the fill-in teacher came over to us, right in front of this young boy mind you and said to me, "Are you sure you want to read with him?" Of course being the person I am, I responded politely, "I am definitely sure."
I went over to read the story of The Little House and the Prairie with him.  In fact this boy read beautifully to me with the exception of a few hard words.  The boy read proudly and was on task the entire time. I decided to spend more time with the boy during vocab sentence time as well, we worked together on the sentences and he even wrote detailed, correct spelling, amazing second grade sentences.
Who knew that the boy who got not one word write on his spelling test I corrected for him last week, could do amazing work when just one person would give him just a little bit of encouragement and attention.