Culture Shock?

What. a. day.
But what an exciting day.

We arrived in Rock Point last night and started work at the school bright and early this morning. Rock Point Community School is...a lot like many of the schools I've worked in? Well, in some ways, anyway. Let me explain.

When I walked into the junior high English classroom, students were catching up after two weeks away from school. I heard conversations about New Year's resolutions and football games, and everyone spoke English. The class was split into pretty distinct social cliques, like pretty much any other middle school class I've seen. On the walls, there were posters with the parts of speech and types of punctuation, and there was a diagram on the board of the five elements of plot structure. Pretty typical. However, once the day began there were some small, but very distinct, characteristics of the Navajo school that made it different from anything I'd seen before.

First hour was a class meeting where the eighth graders briefly discussed fundraising plans to take a class trip at the end of the year. Each class is assigned two basketball games to run the concession stand, but rather than buying concessions in bulk and keeping the proceeds, each family donates items like hot dogs, hamburgers, chips, candy, and - get this - ingredients for fry bread (flour, shortening, and oil). I'm excited to seek out fry bread at the basketball games this week. :) The class advisor talked to the class about their eighth grade promotion (graduation?), and reminded the students that they needed to finish their traditional outfits soon. How cool is it that every student, boy and girl, is required to make their own traditional garments?? SO COOL.

The rest of the day was filled with administering practice tests to prepare for AIMS (the Arizona standardized test) and to give the teacher a better idea of what she needs to work on before testing in late March. Soooo I didn't get to see a lot of instruction, but I did get to observe some student behavior. In the morning, the kids weren't too talkative, and they intently worked on their tests. My soft-spoken teacher didn't give them very much direction, but they didn't take advantage of her, either. Behavior was managed very nonchalantly in this classroom, which is definitely not what I'm used to. We've noticed that all of our teachers have similar management styles, so maybe it's a cultural difference. We'll have to ask Mark.

I was really fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with my teacher during one of her free periods, and I learned a lot about the school and about bilingual education, which is what I'm hoping to discover more about this week. All the teachers in the junior high and high school are referred to by their first names, which I noticed right away. She brought it up, assuming that I had, and when I asked why, she laughed and said she wasn't sure. She's also taught at the elementary level, where she was referred to formally by her last name, and she was the Navajo teacher at the high school, where she was greeted by her clan name. She was caught off-guard when she started at her current position, but she said that she has bigger battles to fight, so she'd respond to whatever the kids call her. The school is very strictly inclusive, and all of my teacher's classes have several students with IEPs. Each teacher is reponsible for turning in lesson plans with accommodations and modifications for students with disabilities. My teacher noted that this is especially challenging in her older classes, which seem to be the farthest behind overall. Her seventh graders are on level, for the most part, but her ninth graders read at about a seventh grade level. So, not only is she making universal accommodations for an entire class, but on top of that, she has to make more modifications for specific students with additional difficulties.

I was really excited to talk to my teacher about Rock Point's bilingual program, and fortunately, since she was the Navajo teacher and has children in the elementary program, she was very knowledgable about it. I did a research paper last semester about English-only policies in public schools (which I'm very against). I found that California and Arizona (where Rock Point is!!) both have state-wide English-only policies which give students one year in an ESL program before they are immersed in the general classroom, regardless of their ability to speak or comprehend English. Foreign languages are strictly prohibited within the school's walls (outside of ESL and foreign language classrooms) in the entire state. I looked at the state learning standards to back up these laws, and while California does have specific standards for English language arts, Arizona's standards talk only about language in a very non-specific manner. How hypocritical for them to have an English-only policy then, right?? My teacher shared that her brother used to teach in a neighboring community, Window Rock, which always does very well on standardized tests, unlike many of the reservation schools. However, the Arizona state board is irritated because the school uses only Navajo in instruction, but their argument is that the standards don't specify that instruction must be in English, so they follow the standards in Navajo. It was a perfect example of what I'd argued in my paper!! Yay!!!

I think that's about all I have to say. I'm so excited to see what my teacher does tomorrow, when she's teaching, not testing.