Unit 2
Reading Response 2.1
Reading Response 2.1
“Confronting Class in the Classroom” made me consider things I had never really given much thought to in the past. For example, I never really made the connection between the “disruptive” students and the ones that teachers deemed “acceptable” and their corresponding societal class.
Part of that may be because I always related more to the “disruptive” group – it wasn’t until I was around eleven or twelve that I realized my family’s ranking as working-class was why I had trouble fitting in with the “acceptable” group of kids at school. One instance that has stuck with me was when my dad was dropping me off at a birthday party. He was talking to the mother of girl throwing the party about what he did for a living and her response to him saying he was a machinist was, “Ooooh, you do shift work.” Needless to say, that was the last party any of the popular kids ever invited me to.
I was very quiet, introverted and studious in school because I knew that if I ever wanted to go to college, I had to get scholarships because there would be no handouts from my parents to get a degree. To save enough money to cover what my scholarships wouldn’t, I enlisted in the National Guard when I was seventeen and during the summer between semesters I worked two to three jobs. Even now, if it weren’t for my military education benefits, I wouldn’t be able to afford to be going back to school. Hooks stated that the things that separate us (race, class, sex) can be catalysts to our drive to overcome obstacles. This is one reason, aside from the obvious patriotic love of country, that I decided to join the military – being a small female (and the first female in my family to enlist) in a very large, predominantly male family with old fashioned gender role views, I was made to feel that I would never make it through basic training much less any subsequent deployments or fulfilling my eight-year contract.
One of the biggest influences I have noticed that class differences make in the classroom is everyone walking on eggshells to avoid offending anyone that is part of one a different class. We are indoctrinated to believe that there is only one way to think, speak and act in the classroom and in public and anything that goes against that is to be feared, rejected, and the offenders must be reprimanded until they conform to “the way things are.”