The Importance of Parental and Communal Support in Our Students' Academic Lives

My only experiences with teaching thus far consist of working with a predominantly low socio-economic, underachieving, predominantly African American population. I student teach at a Michigan high school, and for this reason, I was not too surprised to see, based on my group’s gathered research, that a district’s academic performance and achievement levels greatly depend on the amount of support they receive from parents and the larger community, be it monetary or temporal in form.

During a recent interview with a Special Ed staff member at RHS, I was less than startled to hear that parental involvement is minimal in the process of creating suitable and effective educational programs for learners with disabilities. I also observed the lack of communal support at RHS when I attended two parent/teacher conferences earlier in the year and noticed the same, few parents present, many of whom have students who perform at average or above-average levels in my classes.
I firmly believe in the need for and benefits of high quantities of parental and communal involvement in a student’s academic life. I realized that, although I only spend 72 minutes a day with my students, I have made a more positive impact on them than many adults whom they’ve know their whole lives.

As a teacher, I am a source of stability and reliance. My optimistic words of encouragement too often contradict many other comments they’ve received throughout their academic career. This is especially depressing because I teach senior students, and sometimes by this point in their education, they’ve fulfilled their prophecy of failure, maintain the lowest expectations for themselves, and lack the confidence they need to succeed. I am always super shocked at the thrown reaction I get from a student when I tell him he is much smarter than he’s giving himself credit for or appearing based on his performance in school. I told one student, “Donnell, what’s all this messing around for all the time? I’ve seen your work. You’re totally smart, and if you quit chatting and screwing around you’d be getting so many dates for Prom because of your big brain!” He and his friend stopped elbowing each other (his friend is also pretty smart and SUPER misbehaved), and Donnell responded to me, “We not smart. Look at us. Ain’t nobody think we smart.” His words crushed me.

When parents and community members don’t take notice of the potential of their students or offer time to encourage academic pursuit and success, the students recognize this and are likely to do merely what they know is expected of them. Students need an audience to showcase their achievements. They need incentive to succeed, and without the support of outside parties, especially because too many teachers do not provide that encouragement or faith either, our students will continue failing to meet their own mark. We teachers cannot do this job alone; our classes are far too big and our workload too large for us to give every student the motivation he/she needs to achieve at their highest level. We must work to gain the support of our communities to help us fight for the greatest cause.

Retrospect Thinking about an In-class PPT Activity

I was worried about how I could incorporate the use of PowerPoint in my Poetry class in an interesting and relevant way. Based on a suggestion from Ben offered during our Webinar session, I decided to have my students use PPT to display one of their own poetic creations. Ben told me about a U of M professor, Thylias Moss, who uses PPT and blogs to display links to her poetry. I altered this method and had my students put their poems based on the prompt 'Where I'm From' on multiple slides and incorporate images with the lines to reinforce the poem's meaning. My students hardly complained about this project at all, which definitely signifies their interest in and acceptance of the assignment. Most of the students were able to complete their ten-slide minimum PPT presentation during one 70-minute class period that I alloted for the project. There were problems of adequate resources due to the limited number of working computers and also because my Poetry class is quite large (35 students). I was able to stay with half of my class in the Media Center during the project-creation process, while my mentor watched the remaining students in another of the school's labs. The other trouble my students encountered dealt with accessing sites that contained images they wanted to use in their presentations. The school restricts a great deal of sights, so the kids had difficulty finding pictures that were accurate representations of their lines' meanings. One last problem I encountered concerned time constraints. I planned for the class to watch each other's PPT presentations last Friday, but because our boy's basketball team made it to the State Semi-Finals (!!!!), RHS had a half-day and over 50% of my students weren't present that day. For this reason, I designated an additional class period to watch the presentations because the students are very interested in seeing what their classmates' produced, and I am very excited about the final products also! This PPT activity was a nice change in the regular, routing activities I generally implement, and I really like that I was able to alter the traditional mode of assessment I usually employ.

Another thought I have about incorporating PowerPoint into my classroom on a daily basis comes from a daily routine Autumn has adopted. Autumn makes a PPT presentation about the daily schedule of events for each hour, and the slideshow also includes important information such as possibly unfamiliar vocabulary that the students will encounter that day or significant due dates that are approaching. I really like this idea and plan to try it. The marker board in my mentor's room is often cluttered with writing, including extra-curricular opportunities, scholarship contests, due dates for projects, etc. I try to write the daily schedule on the board everyday, and I've gotten positive feedback from the students when I do, but frequently I don't have room. I also like to place a 'Quote of the Day' somewhere on the board so the classes can discuss it. In addition, I have to write the journal prompts somewhere up there, so it all becomes a bit of a mess. This is intensified by the fact that I have three different classes that require the use of board space. I think using a PPT to present this type of information would be very helpful for both the students' sake and mine.

The problem with this is that my teacher is almost always busy at her computer, so I fear the reliance on a PowerPoint would become a burden for both of us. Also, if I project something from my own computer through the use of a pig-tail, the classroom set up requires me to navigate my computer from a position on the floor, cramped between student desks and my teacher's personal area. I try to minimize the amount of time I need to spend down there amidst feet, backpacks, and garbage! For this reason, I don't know if I can accomplish the task of utilizing a daily PPT to relay information this year, but I am definitely going to try it in my own classroom. Thanks for the idea, Autumn!