Changing Demographics = Changing Expectations?

My classroom discussion for this week is: What influence do differing demographics have on the following: Planning, Instruction, Classroom management, Assessment, Achievement, and Expectations?

This was my response: Before I start my response to this I want to share a link:


The link is a clip from a Family Guy episode. The humor is a bit rough, but if you can get past it, you can see why I thought of it as soon as I read the discussion question. In this episode, The [talking dog] has a job teaching in an affluent [white] neighborhood. He loves it; he makes corny content-related jokes, and does cooky performances that the class loves. It is a teaching utopia. Then he gets transferred to an inner city class where they make a reference to the movie "Stand and Deliver." He tries to do the same things he did in the previous class, and comes in excited to teach, but the kids, and their lives break him down until he comes in unshaven and looking like a hobo. This is a satirical clip, but it isn't until he drops his expectations that he creates some kind of connection with the students. I bring this up for two reasons: 1) we need to meet students where they are, and SHOW them how to get to where they want to go. I've watched kids give up under the weight of a teacher's unattainably high expectations. 2) We need to be flexible and creative in how we connect and engage our students. What works with one group may not work with another, and it could be the same class taught in the same day, but kids are different. I am not one to force kids to feel like a cog in the machine... those are the grown folks that go postal on their work places.

After sharing this with my wife, she asked me WHY expectations would be different?  One of the things that can be assumed is the idea of a normal family environment for students.  She pointed out that kids who live in rich neighborhoods may not have close relationsghips to their parents because they may be out working all the time, they may not have a healthier diet because a Venti Soy Chai latte in the mornings in not nutritional either.  The point I want to get across is this: as educators, we need to meet where they are... exactly where they are.  Id doesn't matter if they are different race, economic level, or academic ability.  Students will not achieve under low expectations, nor will they succeed under expectations that are too high for them to relate to. 

The bar cannot be set across the same level for all demographic setting.  If failure to one person is success to another, the bar cannot be set the same for both.  If minimal requirements for one is to just show up and for another it is to get a B, then the bar cannot be set the same. 

This is not a matter of where kids are, but how to get them to where they want to go. 

The Needed Male Influence in Special Education

I wrote this posting after sitting through an Autism Workshop class on a waiver day titled, "Teaching Independence Through Structure."  What is most striking about the workshop is not anything in the content, but something that I already knew about working in Special Education.  Of the roughly SpEd staffers in this district at the workshop, only about 5 of us are male.  Of those men, 2 are paras, I am student teaching, 1 is the Jr. High Behavior Intervention Specialist, and the last 1 is the district Physical Therapist.  


Hmm... So I was sitting in a workshop that was discussing how to use structure to help students with Autism.  Structure; that thing that that I'm really good at, and that comes naturally to me.  Do is come naturally to me because I am a male?  To a certain extent.  I do not want to start making gross generalizations about gender roles, but this made me wonder is a male-dominated Special Education scenario would have an Autism workshop teaching how to be more nurturing. In my short experience, I've been utilized by SpEd classes and departments to create and/or add structure to a student that they recognized as needing it.  


Is it possible for a SpEd student to be nurtured into independence?  Does a breast fed child want to eat solid foods?  Is weaning a child a nurturing moment, or is it a necessary step in child development?  I cannot answer these for sure.  There are opposing opinions when we talk about getting a child to sleep through the night.  Do we let them cry it out until exhaustion makes them pass out again, or do we soothe them every time they wake and stir.  Or is it somewhere in between?  


I am not making the argument of nurturing or structure being better than the other.  I believe that true growth can come when students get a variety of opposing influences in their life.  Is this possible in Special Education, when the department in any given district is around 94% female?  Not that there's anything wrong with women in SpEd, but there is not enough of an opposing force.  There are the occasional tougher ladies, but there is still a motherly quality in the way they are tough.  There aren't any fatherly influenced in SpEd, however, nor are there any big brothers, uncles, or male cousins in SpEd departments.  Why is this?  


I am not an Alpha Male, but I feel like I need to  be one in order to offset the influences in the students I encounter.  I have to become someone I am not and tap into the very dormant Choleric side of my personality in order to help my students grow.  Why aren't there any Alpha, or even Beta, Males helping the growth of our SpEd kids?  The one time I almost burned out as a SpEd para, I was getting a "Superman Complex".  I was not able to fully concentrate on any particular student I was working with, because I had to continually swoop in to save whoever was having trouble with another student in the department.  Having to leave all the time told the student I was with that they were not as important, and I had to leave them alone without their accommodations or modifications.  


Why would any man want to be the odd-man-out in a SpEd class/department full of women where he has no one to talk with or relate to?  I had a 90-Day evaluation this year where it was assumed that my trouble relating to nothing but women was because I didn't have any Black people to talk to.  I was given a suggestion of the only two other Black staff members to talk with.  Feeling like the odd-man-out was not a racial thing for me, but a gender thing.  I am not throwing out the Race Card in this situation, but it shows how someone can be misunderstood and have their growth hindered when they are subjected to one perspective.