All posts by Claudia Giribaldi

Interpersonal Interactions with Students

Creating Classroom Community
Smith and Lambert, pg. 18

I think classroom management is one of the most difficult tasks that teacher needs to accomplish in the classroom. Having different strategies to teach appropriate behavior during a lesson is key to keep students on task and engaged. The 2 by 10 strategy presented by Smith and Lambert (2008) can be very helpful to address the student(s) who have the most behavioral problems. Interacting on a personal level with the student for two minutes before classroom time for 10 days helps build better rapport with the student. By applying this strategy, according to Smith and Lambert’s (2008) observations, it improved students’ behavior during a lesson. I will like to apply this strategy in the classroom since most if not all students care about being acknowledged beyond their academic performance. I also believe that this technique can be apply to all students in the classroom and build a stronger community in the classroom. 

The impact of foster care on children and families

Reaching Adolescents and How to Respond
Goodman, 2018, Pg. 119

The foster care system seeks to protect children from neglect and abuse from their families. However, the system itself is flawed for a number of reasons that continues to prevent children from saving them from abusive circumstances. Many children, like Makeba, as one of the cases, mentioned by Goodman, have suffered moving from home to home with foster parents that didn’t make them feel safe and abused their weak emotional state. It’s crucial that as teachers do the best we can not to undermine students’ potential just because they are part of the foster care system. Beside understanding their different types of housing arrangements students may have, we need to help students express themselves in different ways, if needed, to overcome and work with their own personal traumas. At the same time, I think that breaking families apart is also heartbreaking when parents really want to work things out. Because of this, they cannot support their children and families are broken apart. This type of neglect experienced by children isn’t done on purpose. There needs to be systems in place to protect the family unit when the parents really want the best for their children and cannot provide enough socioeconomic and emotional support.

Teenagers talking about their friendships with their parents, MVP #12

Friendship, Love, & Sexuality

 

Fletcher and Blair, Pg. 619

I find it interesting that teenagers are very perceptive on how parents’ involvement influences how they share their information about their friendships. According to the article by Blair and Fletcher, if there is history of overreaction and heated arguments between parents and their children, they are less likely to disclose information about their friends and what’s going on in their lives, be it positive or negative. However, also the less involved and interested parents are in their child’s life also affects, over time, the likelihood of sharing information. I may infer that this type of behavior could be also projected by the student in the classroom and it influences if they would like to share important information either positive and negative with their teachers or other school staff. As a result, as teachers, it is important to gradually create an environment where students feel comfortable to engage in the classroom and eventually trust their teachers to share information about their lives and have a good rapport with them.

Gender Classification for Bullying

Gender Socialization & Identities

Ringrose & Renold, 2010, p. 580  

Bullying if often characterized and separated it with the “bully” on one and end and the “victim” on the other. However, the performativity of how different types of bullying is classified goes by the division of gender where boys tend to be more physical on their abuse and aggressive and girls tend to be meaner in their behavior. As a result, even before bullying is acknowledged, boys are expected to be more reactive and aggressive when they are being attacked and girls tend to be more passive. This is problematic because boys then replicate these behaviors as is expected from them based on their gender. Schools also participate in this type of socialization affecting the psychological and mental growth of students.

Xenophonic Bullying in Schools

Newcomers & Perpetual Foreigners
Bajaj, Ghaffar-Kucher, & Desai, 2016, p. 9

Bullying in schools based on race and cultural hasn’t been taken seriously as other types of physical and phycological bullying. It’s pretty scary to think that everything can start with bullying and can turn into a hate crime. The issues faced by brown people from South Asian background, pointed out by Bajaj, Ghaffar-Kucher, & Desai, (2016) continue to be salient and are not covered enough by the media or taken seriously by the school system. You can be targeted, as they mentioned, where 19 people were killed, among them latinx, Native Americans, and other South Asians with “Muslim like” features right after 9/11. These types of xenophobic attacks are still relevant in today’s political climate, as more hate crimes happened and are covered in the media without any solutions. How can we as teachers empower our students to question and prevent these types of attacks from happening? The authors present a modified curriculum to address xenophobic and racist bullying at schools and hopefully as teachers we can implement them and take preventive measures.