September 29

I have yet to meet with my conversation partner! We have been assigned to each other for about 2 weeks now, but she is very busy applying to the master's program at ISU. She said she would contact me on Friday, and I am hoping to finally get my first meeting with her early next week. I have developed an introductory blurb, a discourse completion task worksheet, and a needs analysis for her, and I am really looking forward to getting started.

As for the readings, Sleeter's, Preparing Teachers for Culturally Diverse Schools: Research and the Overwhelming Presence of Whiteness, really spoke to me because I just observed in a bilingual school this Monday in Little Village in Chicago. I actually attended CPS for one year, and I have always been around diversity, but a lot of the students in ISU's program have little background in this area. It is obviously very important to embrace diversity and incorporate it into the classroom no matter what context you are in, and it is interesting to read about the various ways to prepare pre-service teachers to do this. I think ISU is heading in the right direction with the diversity hour requirement for clinical observations and the bus trips to Chicago that are offered to students, but if we delve deeper into the feelings of pre-service teachers and even the professors who are teaching us pre-service teachers, it is really astounding. The materials that we read and view in our education courses portray urban education to be this crazy animal that we have to tackle, when in fact, it all depends on the context. I saw a Chicago public bilingual school that taught pre-K to 2nd grade this Monday, and it was an amazing school. The teachers and resources were more amazing than I ever remember having as a kid, even in the suburbs. The teachers were very enthusiastic, the parents were involved (and they were majority Latino), and the school was full of pride and support. It was a great environment. The classes were large, but well-behaved. It was very interesting to see what a good teacher and environment can do for these kids, regardless of their SES or LEP status. Instead of teaching us to be afraid of urban education, maybe they should let us get out there and see for ourselves. We might just find that it's not that bad.