Seeing Beyond the Stereotype

I would be lying if I said I didn’t go into this school completely free of bias. My school consists of mainly African American children, with Hispanic, Asian and white children mixed in between with the white kids being the minority. I think the main bias I had going into this tutoring program were my assumptions that it’s the parent’s fault that many of these children are high risk and have especially struggle with reading. I assumed that many of the parents of these kids were just lazy and didn’t have any concern for teaching their children to read and assisting them in their homework. Granted, I know that some parents do send their children to school just saying that it’s just the teacher’s responsibility to teach these children. But while the teacher does do most of the teaching, work must be done at home as well in order for the child to be consistent in their learning. I witnessed this with one of the parents in my kindergarten classroom. The parent was blaming the teacher for the student’s poor academic performance. This is where a lot of my assumptions were made. But I also realized that it isn’t just the case of lazy parents in a lot of situations, but some of the parents may be single parents who are working two or three jobs where they don’t have time to help their child to read. This is a very difficult situation because teacher’s can only help their students so much and without a parent’s influence, it’s hard to encourage a child to continue reading at home. These assumptions can be related to the article by Allan Johnson, What it Means to be involved in Privilege and Oppression. In this reading Johnson discusses the path of least resistance and how that’s the path we usually find ourselves on, “regardless of whether we think about where they lead or the consequences they produce”. In making my assumptions that parents just weren’t taking responsibility for the care of their children, I was falling into a general stereotype that a lot of people make. I was falling into a “pattern of oppression” without realizing it and I made that assumption before I thought that a reason some of these children don’t receive help at home may be because their parents just don’t have the time to help with homework because they are just trying to make enough money for their family to get by. I’ve learned that I have to let go of these misconceptions and realize there may be more to the story. As Johnson says, we have to avoid making these stereotypes, and start taking the paths of more resistance until people start to notice and you can start to make a difference.