When reading the Howard article I was strongly reminded of several good teachers and moments that I have had through the years. What really got to me though was I thought about all the things I’ve seen that aren’t ok, and that I have seen teachers do things that shouldn’t be done. We should be caring to our students and treat them like people, and like people we want to have relationships with. We need to have relationships with our students. It is essential, and there is no way to be a good teacher, let alone a multicultural teacher, if we aren’t perusing those relationships in the classroom. I love reading stories about good teachers and teachers who reach out to their students and work to make a good classroom culture. This I think gets harder as students get older, young children are much more accepting of others, because they haven’t yet formed as many prejudices. I at one time had two little girls in my classroom, an African American little girl and a Caucasian girl. The little African American girl proudly announced to the other girl that she was ‘black’ and she was pleased with this pronouncement. The Caucasian girl said “you’re not black, you’re brown.” They actually discussed this at length and nearly started getting into a fight but I intervened, though not right away. What was going on was one girl was proud of who she was and the other little girl didn’t have a prejudice and saw her friend for what she was.
patriciastjohn 