Diversity of Community and Culture

When I look back at my first 18 years of life that I spent solely in Morris, Illinois, I feel so grateful for the life that I had no idea how lucky I was to have.  I had a dad that had a good enough job that he worked hard at so that my mom could stay at home with me and my siblings.  I had extended relatives that never hesitated to help look after us if needed.  If I needed help with my homework, my parents or older brother would always stop whatever they were doing to help.  I really thought this was the norm, that this is how everybody lived.

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Flash forward to my time spent at UW-Parkside.

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I've completed hundreds of clinical hours in various schools around southeastern Wisconsin, each with drastically different cultures and environments.  All of these schools had a much wider range of students with different cultures and races than I had ever been exposed to in my schooling.  Along with these hours of student teaching, I was also introduced to the COP Houses, where COP stands for Community Oriented Policing.  The main purpose of these Houses is to reduce crime, improve the quality of life within the neighborhoods, and to build stronger relationships between police and community members.  It also acts as almost a safe haven for students for after school hours, where they can go and be supervised if there isn't an adult at home after school, and acts as a way for them to stay out of trouble.  They're typically in neighborhoods that are a little rough around the edges and are more poverty stricken, and the COP House that I volunteered at was no exception.

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I received an email from one of these houses looking for a math tutor for one of their middle school students that showed up on a regular basis, and I pursued it, really just because I thought it would look good to have tutoring experience on my resume.  I went into it not expecting much, but after spending so much time there, I realized how eye opening this opportunity really was.

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While I knew students came from all different backgrounds and have various levels of opportunity, it wasn't really anything I'd ever experienced before.  We would talk about it in all my education classes, but it was never anything I had actually seen or been able to connect back to the classroom.  This experience showed me some of the drastically different backgrounds that students come from, and showed me just what opportunities, or lack thereof, that many of them had.  This was something that was so new to me, as so many of my peers in Morris grew up with similar home lives as me.  I had no idea that some children really didn't have anyone to go home to after school.  I didn't know so many kids didn't have anyone to help them with their homework.  I didn't know not all kids had backpacks.  Coming from small town Illinois I didn't even know that not all neighborhoods were safe.  Meeting these kids and tutoring them taught me so much about diversity within the community and how diversity isn't a bad thing.  These kids took hard situations and made the most of them, and really succeeded from doing so.  This experience will really help me when I become a teacher by reminding me that not all students have the same home life, support, or resources to do what is needed from them, and because of this I'll be a much more understanding teacher.