Boys and Girls Club Week 2

This week at the boys and girls club was a challenging yet insightful experience. The first day of my field experience this week, all of my students were absent due to early release. On the second day, I got to work with them breifly before they joined the rest of the classmates for their test review. During this experience is where I was able to fully experience the culture of the first grade group.

For the review, the BGC instructor had them play the game of four corners to get them moving and excited to reivew their math questions. There was approximately 15 students in that group and at least 6 of them were having behavioral issues all at once. It was a very overwhelming environment to comtrol and once we solved one issue with a child, another one would do something to ruin the flow of the four corners game. This caused for the class as a whole to lose attention to the task at hand. Most of the student behaviors problems were due to students picking at other students, which caused emotional outbursts and harsh name calling that only escalated the situation further. When the instructor tried to negate the situation, the students who were told to sit down or stop became very angry and would act out further in the behavior the instructor told them to stop doing. For example, one student, who is in my focus group, was told to stop touching some of the instructor's equipment while in time out. He then proceeded to touch other things around him because he was still angry. We finally came to the conclusion that all the students needed to sit down and answer the questions using their fingers only.

As I was observing and trying to help the situation, I realized that most of these students may be acting out in random ways to try and get attention from an adult, they may feel like they are not being heard, or that they are being treated unfairly. I think that although my assumptions may be true for some, it's important to not assume that each child in this classroom is angry due to their living situations (lack of perental attention, no father figure rough neighborhoods, exposure to negavtive behaviors). Most if not all of the students at this boys and girls club live in poverty or low economic status. Like the article, "The Myth of the "Culture of Poverty" was explaning, it is not just to assume that students are behaving the way they are because they are subject the culture of poverty. I think that if the instructors and myself go into this experience expecting more from them instead of being products of their environment , we will get better result from our students. Learning will become enjoyable to them when we as educators alter the methods in which we teach to involve the arts and more physical activities.

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