Cultural Connections

As an education student, we are constantly told to make connections from the content to real-life experiences. This helps the student relate with the lesson and helps them retain the information for future recall. It is a lot easier to remember something you can tie into your own life, rather than something completely new and foreign to you. Speaking from personal experience, I have never had much of an issue making real-life connections while I was teaching in Minnesota. The same cannot be said for here in Barrow, though. I find myself continuously trying to think of a way to relate the lesson of the day to something they have had experience with and see or do on a daily basis. I find it more and more difficult to make connections with something I know they have prior knowledge of. They do not have exposure to an array of things that seem so familiar to us in Minnesota. For example, Justin was working with geometric shapes and was talking about a shoebox. Numerous hands shot up in the air all with the same question, "what is a shoebox?" I also worked with 2nd graders that were learning about clocks and time. I asked them the simple question "what time of day is it when it is dark out?" This seems like an obvious answer, but you have to remember that these kids do not have sunlight on a regular basis like we do in Minnesota. The students all began to ask what time of year I was talking about, because they know if we are talking winter that it is dark almost all day. It is something as little as these instances that make you take a step back and realize that you cannot assume just because a student where you are from understands something, means that these children will.

I bring this topic up because as a pre-service teacher, we are only allowed 6 weeks to get to know and work with these students. That is not an ample amount of time, and there is not much room to gain a background knowledge on your students or the culture. We are really put on the spot here diving into the culture, as well as the teaching profession. It is really testing us on a daily basis, but I feel we are all becoming stronger teachers because of it. It makes you reflect on the individual student, rather than the lesson itself. It is a good time to practice these skills for future reference when we are working with our classrooms. If we can tie real-life experiences to students in a culture that we have only been involved with for 2.5 weeks, I feel we can come back to Minnesota and tie in the content to things we experience daily with ease.

Enjoy the week, everybody.

Travis