Reading Cultural struggle brings back lots of memories from my past. I was someone who left class throughout my younger years to go to "reading rooms". As children described on page fifty-four, Peley and Raji's ESL room was small and dark. It reminds me of my past reading rooms. Often times these were small dark rooms with some posters and a small round table in them. The lack of coordination described between the general classroom and the material in the ESL program was just as I remembered. Looking back, and I think every class had these students growing up, the faces of the children being left out, as described in chapter three, still strike me. I often times blew these children off as most of the children did, something that pains me looking back on it.
"Where cultural conflict exists, struggles abound(p.8)." To me, there is no better description of what has been shown in this book so far. Mrs. Starr cannot understand what is wrong and sometimes, when she gets confused, we see her just move on. She never dug deeper to understand these two students and where they come from.
Dominick, I agree entirely that "when cultural conflict exists, struggles abound" is the "big idea" of the Chapters. Throughout the book Ruggiano-Schmidt assures us of the children's capabilities - for example how Raji is an excellent soccer player, artist, mathematician (the memory game) and how Peley can follow directions and finish most tasks quickly. What she keeps illustrating is how the students issues exist as a result of cultural misunderstandings (I particularly liked the section about the idiomatic expressions, "Wise as an ---" and the kids were befuddled why the answer was owl). But I think too that while Ruggiano-Schmidt lays the blame with the teacher for not making her classroom an environment of cultural understanding, she excuses Mrs. Starr for this because she sees it as a result of inadequate training and emphasis on cultural importance in all of education. That is essentially why the book is written towards teachers in training, so that we can be aware of these issues in our future classrooms.
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