People are biased & Prompt #4

The culturally competent teacher is aware of the diverse cultural groups represented in his/her classroom, investigates the sociocultural factors that influence student learning, and is able to integrate this knowledge into his/her teaching.

It is true. No one enters a classroom without a personal history; a personal history that forces you to be bias one way or another. I don’t know about you but I would love to say that I am an unbiased person. That is clearly impossible. Where you come from and what you have witnessed and experienced in your life shapes who you are. It creates certain stereotypes that can be hard to break. So, Instead of saying that I am not bias, I can say that I try to be as open minded as possible.


I think many people can be unaware of their bias tendencies. Let me give a small example of how I am bias. Whenever I see an Oldsmobile, the type of car, I think there should be an old man driving it. I would never drive an Oldsmobile because I would feel old inside of it. I blame my grandfather for this. Anyway, I obviously need to be more flexible about my automobile stereotypes. This is just a minor example that I can not break but bias predispositions in the classroom can cause a barrier between the teacher and student.

For starters, let me answer where I grew up. Well, in an all white, fairly rich community. That’s right, the opposite of where I am volunteering. Clearly, this can cause me to be ignorant to my students and their lifestyle.

This reminds me of an incident with a student that I was helping with math. She was using a mechanical pencil that needed to be refilled. Another student sitting next to her grabbed it with the intentions to fix it for her but broke it instead. The owner of the pencil got angry in front of my eyes, turning red, ready to yell at her fellow student. I took action and took action very fast by removing the furious student from the other who clearly made a mistake. I instructed him to finish the next few questions as I talked to his classmate.

As I took her aside to help her get over the incident, a few thoughts went through my mind. One was, boy, is this child spoiled if she throws a tantrum over a pencil! The other thought was, wow, this student may have an anger problem! I sat her down and told her that I’m sorry that she is upset and asked if she wanted to talk about it. She was almost in tears as she conveyed her family’s lack of money. Her mother specifically told her not to lose anymore pencils. I felt awful! The thought never crossed my mind. I wanted to tell her that I’d make it all better by buying her a whole new box but knew that gifts were not appropriate. I told her I was sorry and gave her a pencil from the room we were studying in and gave her a minute to collect herself. She came back to the table and was ready to continue within a minute. Her fellow student apologized without me asking him to. It was also wrong of him to grab someone else’s things.

This incident only reminds me of the words by Allan Johnson. He shared his words of wisdom in a presentation called Our House is On Fire. He argues the definition of race and how it is not biologically defined but rather socially defined. According to him, we are all part of the problem of race and negative stereotypes and we need to first recognize that and accept it. He argues, “Every day, decent, moral, well-intentioned people participate in economic and political systems organized in ways that produce mountains of injustice and unnecessary suffering. When you go home tonight, examine your clothing and ask yourself where it came from…”

While I drove home, after watching this student in tears, I thought about the $40 scarf I was wearing. Now, Johnson proposes the bigger issue of cheap labor that made my scarf and my day demonstrated where my money could have gone; buying the entire class a months supply of pencils to take home with them. It was an eye opening day.