All posts by Sara Y Hemstock

The Daunting World of Parent-Teacher Conferences

Blurring the In-School Ouf-of-School Line, Urban Adolescents

“Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (2003) has written eloquently about how intimidated many parents feel when they come into their children’s classrooms for conferences with teachers. She explained that the sights, smells, and sounds of school, the small chairs, the authority of the teacher-all these elements transport many parents to their own childhood schooling experiences, some of which may have been unpleasant or fightening.” -Fabienne Doucet

I chuckled out loud when I read this quote from Doucet’s “(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds,” because it explains perfectly what I experienced/felt when I met with 6th grade parents for the first time at Parent-Teacher Conferences last week. I noticed when speaking to some parents about their child’s performance in Spanish class as being good, the parents would later questioned my opinion and felt that wasn’t true at all. I didn’t necessarily understood where the lack of disbelief was coming from until some parents began to talk about their own experiences of taking Spanish in middle/high school and how it was a really hard subject for them to learn. That’s when I finally understood where the disbeliefs were coming from.

One parent in particular stood out for me when he asked his son to leave the classroom so he could have a chat with my CT and I alone and was begging us to give ways to force his son to speak Spanish outside of school. I told the parent that his son participates a lot and is always the first one to arrive in class and even runs up to the whiteboard to be the first one to answer the trivia question of the day. His parents, especially, his father didn’t buy the fact that his son could truly be interested in learning Spanish because he doesn’t show any interests at home. His father consistently kept comparing himself to his son when he was his age and even went as far as telling us how he never took Spanish seriously until now and he doesn’t want his son to miss out on an amazing opportunity. My CT had to calmly say to him that “you can’t force your son to do something, if he doesn’t want to. We, his teachers, need to be the ones to light a fire inside of him and push him pass his limits, not you because you could potentially push him away and make him rebel against your wishes.”

It makes for an awkward and uncomfortable situation when you, the teacher, come in contact with parents for the first time and you’re not sure what to expect as well as not being sure what the family dynamic is like at home. I felt like some of the parents were disconnected and not truly listening to what the teachers had to say about their child whether is be good or bad in Spanish and simply were too focus on comparing their academic themselves when they were younger to their kids. It’s a difficult task bridging the two worlds togther, but it is something that has to be done to avoid further miscommunication and mistrust between parents and teachers.

Snapchat is the new CNN

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Media and Technology Critiques, Urban Adolescents

“Snapchat provides perhaps the best direct conduit to millennials, with 41 percent of those 18 to 34 year olds in the U.S. active on the platform. The app is quickly becoming the most preferred social platform compared to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter among millennials.”-Kerry Flynn, Mashable

That sounds about right, at least for me, that Snapchat usage is surpassing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram combined. Since I’ve moved to New York City, I’ve spent my time observing on the subways and almost always you see a group of teenagers laughing, talking, and always having their phone out. I witnessed 3 teenagers a couple of weeks ago, maybe early high school, get on the same train car and almost immediately they started taking ridiculous “snaps” of each other and sending them to everyone on their contact list. I knew they were just doing it for fun to pass the time while they were on their way to their next destination, but it made me feel uncomfortable because I wondered if maybe they were taking “snaps” of me or other passengers in the car and were laughing and poking fun at us and to whom were these “snaps” being sent to. I also wondered where do teens draw the line with their “snaps”? When does it become a situation of pure enjoyment and entertainment, but slowly turns into a new way to cyberbully?

I looked on various news articles to see if there was anything that remotely cast Snapchat in a bad light and what I found was intriguing to see the different views on the new social media app. Leigh Seger from Covenant Eyes: Internet Accountability and Filtering, wrote a damning article about the horrors of Snapchat and how parents don’t have a clue in how it works and what the consequences are for their children, if they don’t use good judgement and intent. Snapchat was born in the spring of 2011, it was immediately coined as the new “sexting app” amongst adolescents due to the nature of sending and viewing photos in a short amount of time of 20 seconds or less, however, unbeknownst to many of the Snapchat users, their contacts could actually save the photo by doing a screenshot or even using another device to take a photo of it and then saved on their phone to be later distributed without the sender’s consent; this has led to instances where semi-nude photos have re-emerged on different platforms and even have been sold for profit (Seger, 2013). Of course, this new quick and sneaky communication app opened the door to a whole new slew of cyberbullying, sexting, and even gaining revenge against and amongst adolescents.

Of course, most parents and educators only look at Snapchat in a negative light and tend to forget that Snapchat could potentially be use for good in meaningful and purposeful ways within the classroom and beyond. Snapchat is trying to change their tune from being a “sexting” app to an app where their users are constantly being informed about breaking news from around the world and giving the power to users to document what they think is newsworthy. Just last week on October 19th-20th, Snapchat ran a 24-hour Live Story, about the attacks on ISIS in Mosul as well as showcasing President Barack Obama addressing the nation as to what was going on over in the Middle East (Flynn, 2016). Snapchat is slowly becoming the preferred way to get quick and unbiased news, that’s one of the main reasons, I, myself, have a Snapchat is because I like how they present the news in short intervals and you can pick and choose what you want to see/hear as well as being a contributor.

A college student from King’s College, Rodolfo Santoyo, was quoted in Mashable saying that he originally downloaded the app for casual communicating back when he was a sophomore in high school, but now realizes Snapchat is a great way for teens to be informed and engaged with what is going on in the world: “The filters and text you can add make the picture more interesting. However, lately I’ve been paying attention to the stories on there. They add content in there because they know teens will see it and start talking about it. Every time there is a good story I hear it from friends” (Flynn, 2016).

I think if we as educators can put the Snapchat to good use in the classroom to teach students the benefits of receiving and creating news, then students would be less incline to use the app in harmful and hurtful ways against their peers. 

Sources:

Flynn, K. (2016, October 21). Snapchat is a camera company with a lot of first-person media to offer. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from http://mashable.com/2016/10/21/snapchat-breaking-news/#KvPtyMDFssqk

Seger, L. (2013, February 28). Snapped: An Innocent App Goes Wild (All About Snapchat). Retrieved October 23, 2016, from http://www.covenanteyes.com/2013/02/28/snapchat-sexting-app/

Fact or Fiction? Can students decide on their own?

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Urban Adolescents

“In my opinion, there is very little instruction about and for media literacy in schools. While some classes do receive newpapers to examine, how much classroom time is really available to analyze the newspaper’s content critically?…..” -Joanne.

The first part of Joanne’s quote from Paul R. Carr’s investigation about Critiquing the Mainstream Media as a Form of Democratic Engagement really stuck with me while I was reading the rest of the article. Joanne’s quote really speaks a lot of truth especially in today’s world where newspapers, I believe, are becoming more obsolete. Only a handful of people I actually know have the opportunity to sit down and really read the newspaper from cover to cover as well as having the time to “analyze” the articles from a critical viewpoint.

About a month ago at the beginning of the school year, my cooperating teacher thought it would be a wonderful idea to have her 8th grade Spanish students do a written assignment telling her why they think language learning is so important to teach at schools, but also to them. I thought it was a great idea to do because it was setting up for what I hoped was going to be a meaningful, fun, and interesting last year for the students at middle school before they went off to high school, but instead it turned out to be the complete opposite of what we both, my cooperating and I, expected. Majority of the students didn’t even know where to begin when it came to looking for sources on the web. They immediately thought Wikipedia was a good source to cite and even said, “we will just type the topic into google and the first thing that pops up about language learning is good enough.” I was completely shocked and taken aback by how lazy. easily manipulated, and careless these students are by what they see or “read” in the media.

It’s a sad cry when we hear students nowadays not being able to figure out what is fact and what is fiction in the media. I really liked the suggestion that was presented at the end of Carr’s study where this is a community based issue at schools and every teacher needs to be on board in order to be willing and able to teach media literacy and how it can be incorporated in every subject area for example, Social Studies and English as well as Math and Science. This is just one measure that can be taken in consideration when teachers are lesson planning.

“…….I do think students need to receive instruction about how the media operates, along with using critical thinking skills to decipher what motives are behind news presentations.” -Joanne

A Rutgers Tragedy

Urban Adolescents

If navigating the challenges of being an adolescent are tough enough in middle and high school, then sometimes it can be just as difficult for young adults who are still trying to figure themselves out and be comfortable in their own skin such as Tyler Clementi. The Story of a Suicide really hit close to home for me figuratively and emotionally just because 1. I’m from New Jersey…Hillsborough, NJ to be exact and 2. majority of my high school friends ended up going to Rutgers and were probably in a same class as Tyler or even lived in the same dorm building and 3. I vividly remember when this story broke all over the news about a young man named Tyler Clementi who decided to take his own life due to being  publicly humiliated by his liaison.

I think Tyler already had the cards stacked against him way before he even started attending Rutgers because he was already labeled as an outsider who had no friends and it didn’t help that he was trying to make his parents happy by trying not to disappoint them by his sexual orientation. Dharun, on the other hand, had absolutely no reason to go and attack Tyler way before getting to know him, but that just goes to show you how insecure he truly was about himself and how he craved to be known as the “cool one.” I thought it was a little ironic when Ian Parker, the author of the article, interviewed some of Dharun’s “friends” and they blatantly said “he’s a real jerk.” Now, I don’t know if any of my friends would say something like that about me behind my back.

In a sense you kind of have to feel sorry for Dharun because it clearly shows by his actions and what he did to Tyler as well as how he manipulated his so called friend, Molly Wei, into helping him perpetuate the situation. He truly is in my eyes what his “friend” said before a “real jerk” who has absolutely no empathy nor is he conscious as to what he did by forcing someone to take their own life away because his ego got so big and in the way to even realize what the consequences were going to be. This whole story is a tragedy and it doesn’t help that more and more young people feel shut out and turned away when they are the ones who are most vulnerable to be pushed to the limit and be forced to take their life in the end just like what Tyler Clementi did due to not having enough emotional support to help them get through something so humiliating like this.

The Ugly Duckling Syndrome

Urban Adolescents

Reading the 4 articles we had this past week for class really resonated with me about my own personal experiences of being an adolescent and how it was the most awkward time period in my life. When I read Brown and Knowles’s chapter called Understanding the Young Adolescent’s Physical and Cognitive Growth, I came across the blurb that said “write a few thoughts about how you felt about yourself during that time of your life.” And I can definitely say I was one of those girls who hit puberty the earliest out of all of my friends and it created a very dark time for me emotionally and physically. It was really hard for me to accept the changes I was going through at the age of 11.

I think when it got really bad for me as an adolescent was 7th grade. I hated everything about 7th grade from being the youngest and most vulnerable student at school to feeling completely insecure of myself as well as being withdrawn, shy and awkward with my physical looks. I was one of those at that age who wore braces, had glasses and as a security blanket use to wear a big oversized blue windbreaker jacket to cover up my physical changes because I hated how people gawk at me and felt really uncomfortable. I could definitely relate to the point made in the article where the teacher complained about all the students in her class wanting to go to the bathroom every 5 minutes so see what they looked like and the teacher finally brought it to the attention of the principal where the prinicipal decided to install a mirror in every classroom, so students didn’t feel the need to run and look at the themselves in the bathroom mirror and miss class because of it.

Being an adolescent and especially one who goes through puberty early like myself is a real struggle, but also for teachers and parents too in terms of how to make students not feel so alone and letting them know that they aren’t facing the whole world on their own. I truly believe it is important as middle school teachers to create that safe space within and out of the classroom and having a talk where it breaks barriers for example the label or the scissor activity games mentioned in Philip’s articles. I unfortunately never had that in my middle school where I felt safe enough and could go to my teachers if need be and I think that is something that has slowly been changing since I was a middle schooler.