E03: Teacher's role in classrooms for equal learning opportunities to students (USA)

Transcription by audio.com The speaker discusses how students from varied backgrounds show differences in motivation and engagement. They mention working with students in special education and highlight the challenges faced by students with disabilities in obtaining services like individualized education plans. Factors such as parental pressure leading to anxiety, academic stress, and trust issues with adults are also explored. Different communities of students, including transient and language-specific schools, are highlighted, showing the diverse experiences children face. Trust in adults and societal pressures on children are discussed as contributing factors to student stress and challenges. So you said like there are different kind of students coming from different backgrounds, right? So like have you noticed differences in students motivations or engagement based on their backgrounds like whether If you could like tell something were you able to find out the differences Yeah, definitely. I mean I worked with Students who I worked with a lot of different kinds of students, um, especially in special ed. Um, You become like really aware of a lot of the differences because um, it's hard to get diagnosed with a disability as a kid if there's a lot of That's a lot of different things that have to happen in order to get to the point where you get that Service of having um, and what's called an iep which stands for like individualized education plan Okay, and often the kids from the metco program which is the program that would bus the kids in um would be given special education um and When you would look at what the disability is It would say like communication like Like I don't know something very vague um, it was clear that it was Hard for those students, um and that difficulty exhibited in um their academics Hurting and and it wasn't because they couldn't learn or something. It's just there's a lot of stress going on And so you also have the kids that there's kids that have like terrible anxiety because of the pressures from their parents um, so it goes on on the other end of the spectrum, right you have people who are I mean i'm a math tutor right now and I opened one day of my week and I don't I don't I don't advertise myself I My whole entire day was filled with kids within a day because there are so many parents who want special Their kid to be pushed ahead just that little bit in math because that's going to give them the edge, right? So you have those kids who are super stressed you have like I said a lot of transient kids who are Like from a different country that know they're going back to that country Um, actually there's an interesting thing that happens in brookline where each of the k-8 schools is um specializes in a language So if you come from a different country and you speak one of those eight languages You can choose to send your kid to that school. So the school I spent most of my time in was the japanese school So if you spoke japanese You could go to that school, but a lot of japanese kids like I mean they had they had some people in their same situation, but I think it's fairly isolating to move somewhere as a child and know that you're only there for four years like there's something about that that is really Hard and so yeah, just like very distinct and different communities of kids um, but I think everything's relative and Being a kid just sucks It's hard. It's hard for them You said like those students who are like stressed about things Yeah, are those students like stressed about like their academics because they have this pressure of like being good in school Or is it like other kind of stresses? Well, I mean it depends because it's also it depends on your ability to trust adults because that's the other piece of it is that a lot of uh, like honestly I mean my Probably closest connection with a child was one of my metco students that I personally supported when I was a paraprofessional, so she was on a caseload of like five people, but I mean she lacked really basic skills and how to ask for help Right because she didn't trust adults because historically She would act a certain way that she deemed The way to ask and and would be surprised by an adult's reaction Right, you know like when you're a little kid You're gonna I don't know Just act you're just going to be yourself. And if that self is not what an adult in the room is looking for They're going to treat you really differently. And so by the time she was 12 she didn't have a single skill in talking to an adult and you know That was definitely a trust thing. So I don't know. It's different because like I would say the kids that are really stressed by The grades that have the opposite problem that they trust adults so much that they think they know what's best for them So these adults are all telling me I need to do well in school. I need to do well in school, right? It's like the over trust of the adult So I guess they both have trust issues as adults It's like they're like In this idea of like how Yeah, like both groups of people are in a place of either I trust in exactly how the structure of the world should be or I really don't trust anything at all, right? I don't have a child and i'm not here to judge how people raise children I do think we have an issue in our country with like Treating children like property. There's like a thing where people will say well, this is my kid. So I do this with the kid um and that can be challenging but