Other Peoples Children

Jordan, Bailey, and myself completed a book study on Lisa Delpit's Other Peoples Children.  We split up the chapters evenly between the three of us.  Originally our group was a 6 person group.  We were going to complete the chapter sumaries and then compare the two different books.  we found that with scheduling issues and other obstacles it was best to split the groups separate.  Our group worked together and held cohesive with style of formatting and key points.  We discussed some of the big ideas and overarching concepts of the book and how some chapters bleed into other chapters and are essentially saying the same thing about different issues.  

Reflection

The biggest takeaways from reading this book have to be specifically about how real racism and discrimination are and how they are not always blatantly visible.  I learned some specific concepts to apply to my teaching.  Some of these concepts may be to let students listen to different tapes from people of different cultures.  It may be the language I use around people from different cultures.  It may be doing activities that recognize stereotypes but still show the flaws and issues with them.  I really took aways that the way we view our students may not always be the way they view us.  We as educators need to strive to teach our students to be better than us.  We need to accept that we as educators have certain biases against students because of our point of view and our own cultures and backgrounds.  Educators need to acknowledge the language differences in different cultures and make students aware of them.  While it is important to be able to speak with proper english it is also important to be able to decipher and understand slang and other forms of cultural diversity.   My overall takeaway from the process of the book project is pretty basic.  Don't wait until the last minute.  the other big important idea is communication.  Since all 3 of us are music majors, our schedules are horrendous to try to line up.  If we had communicated better and set up more meetings, the process would've bee much smoother and relaxed.  We also didn't get to discuss much about our individual chapters as we did the overall idea of the book.  I honestly didn't enjoy the process, but I did enjoy the outcome of reading and discussing the book.