Service Learning Prompt #2

In my classroom of 12 students, I find myself being the complete minority. All together, i have 1 white student, 5 black students, 1 Asian student, and 6 Latino students. For the most part, the majority of them all speak and are fairly fluent in English, and some of them are able to speak Spanish. The children as a whole seem very well behaved, and every time i have gone so far i have seen very few absences. The children seem engaged in the material of the classroom, albeit with a subtle level of distraction that can be seen among all children of that age. It seems that each and every one of the children can read very well, and because they are among the accelerated group they read aloud together quite perfectly. In many ways, i feel as though I am getting a somewhat biased look at how a classroom in providence would be conducted, simply because i am in a much smaller group of students that are all considered accelerated. The children show an appreciation for learning and obeying rules that i feel could only be truly implemented in a child that has a powerful guiding force that exists outside the classroom. The cooperativeness of the students has helped to show me that many of them probably have a fairly stable family life outside of the classroom, in which rules and obligations are dictated to them by more than just their teacher. On the other hand, however, the other classroom that i attend seems to be in complete opposition to these very ideas. Within the other classroom, which my teacher suggested I look into so as to form a more cohesive experience in public schools, many of the children are found to be loud, obnoxious, and uncooperative. Several times the teacher had to completely stop the class in order to quiet the classroom down. Many of the children do not speak perfect English, and it is obvious that there is no real direction at home or from parents. I find it difficult to understand how one teacher can have only 11 accelerated students, and yet other teachers are forced to deal with 27 students of varying levels of competency.