Child Study- Amalgam

The goal of this project was to become more familiar with the various ways that I come to establish relationships with my students, the different ways they communicate with me, and how relationships grow. Unfortunately, the student pool at my placements was very inconsistent, and twice my intended child for study stopped coming to the program. So, in this blog I will outline three students and how each has taught me something different about the above topics.

The first student is Bilma. Bilma was the student with whom I interacted most consistently. She took an early interest in approaching me when she realized that when I threw a football around with students, I made no distinction between male and female students and would allow anyone to throw with me. I think she appreciated that she could pursue an interest in sports she had that was frequently quashed by other male students, so she sought me out every day I was at Ridge to ask me to throw around with her. She even expressed an interest in developing a broader skill set in football: after she felt comfortable with normal tosses, she started asking for throws that would make her run in or run back to catch.

Working with Bilma helped remind me of some lessons I once learned about play. She helped me engage a younger student named Abigail who had a delicate medical condition and tossed the ball gently to Abby anytime she wanted to join our game, clearly putting into practice the inclusive ideal I claim to always want to embrace. I would have to say that of the students I interacted with, she was the most consistently energetic, sincere, and fun to play sports with. She didn't get mad or competitive and she enjoyed playing for its own sake. Unlike some other students, particularly boys, who got very competitive and even mean during playground games, all Bilma ever wanted to do was just have a catch. It was very honest and very sweet, and Bilma was a great example of how unexpected friendships begin between students and teachers when the student engages first.

The second student I interacted with was another girl, Juleissa, who was actually one of my students in Mrs. Morales' classroom in my GenEd placement. Juleissa was always sweet and eager to impress; when I asked a classmate of hers during the school year if he would do some additional math practice for me, she asked if she could do extra math practice as well. So I knew that talking to her would be easy and very natural. Juleissa is a good example of how an existing relationship of understanding between a teacher and student can be built upon.

I started talking to Juleissa more in Week 2 when she was coming to the program more regularly, and she was very eager to share information about her interests and home. She loves art and math, is OK with computers, and doesn't much care for science. She's not coming back to Ridge in the fall unless she decides she wants to, because she moved over the summer and her mother was planning to enroll her in a closer school to her new home. She has an older brother, and older sister, and a younger sister. She thinks her older siblings are too mean to her mom. She and her mom apparently have a great relationship and she thinks of herself as the only one of her siblings whom her mom would consider a really good friend outside of being just a family member. She sometimes gets mad at boys for excluding girls, especially her, from activities, and will sometimes just abandon an activity and sulk if she feels the boys are being mean to her. I expanded on our relationship from earlier in the year by talking about more serious topics with her and she was very open and willing to share. I was impressed with how introspective she was at such a young age, and she taught me more than anything else that sometimes students can be really deep thinkers about society even when they are only just looking at their own lives.

The last student who showed me that student honesty and confidence can come even at unexpected moments is Alexis from La Casa. Alexis was a really sweet boy who was in my classroom during my time there. He has an adopted sibling, which prompted him to bring up the topic of adoption unexpectedly during one of my finance lectures at La Casa. I halted the lesson to emphasize the importance and weight of the topic he suggested, in no small part due to the fact that I was personally affected by adoption. He mentioned it again to me on my final day, saying, "That must really be sad for you." I was a bit surprised by his answer, because my adoption story is not tumultuous or sad at all, but I knew why he might think that, so I engaged him in a serious and intelligent conversation about being in a family that loved me.

What I didn't expect from the exchange was how saying that I was so happy to end up in a family that loved me led him to directly start talking about his father. His father does not live with him. Alexis also has two siblings from his father who live with him and his mother, while Alexis' father lives with his ex-wife and his other three children. Alexis expressed sadness that he never sees his dad, even on his dad's day off (Sunday), and that although his dad said he would try to get him a Nintendo DS for his birthday (which is today), he doesn't believe he'll get one because his dad doesn't pay him much attention or seem to act like he is happy to have Alexis around. The story was quite heartbreaking, quite unexpected, and again was prompted by a an unforeseen and unintended departure by Alexis from a conversation into another serious topic that he felt comfortable enough to share about. I had a couple of really great exchanges with him, and I learned a lot about how important an ear can be to a student who may just appear to be expressing random or innocuous thoughts, but who may in fact have some burning concerns, sadness, or issues that he or she really needs to get out. So I learned from Alexis to always be mindful of what may be causing a student to engage randomly and/or energetically in a discussion that in ways that express connections they might be making that I cannot see in the moment.

From my students, I learned a great deal about how students approach teachers they think they can trust or respect, how existing relationships of friendship can build into deeper relationships of trust, and how students say a lot without saying anything sometimes or how they may be saying so much more than I think, which I can find out by allowing them access to more sensitive areas of my own life. I hope that I can continue to carry these lessons, and the children who taught them to me, in my heart as I progress through my career. These are lessons I would not soon choose to easily forget. These children were wonderful, and getting to know them through some of these less academic avenues enabled me to form bonds with them in different ways than I would normally have thought to try in a classroom, but in ways that I would now feel much more comfortable trying.