As this is the second multicultural education class I am in during my graduate career, there are certain topics that keep coming up in literature that I read. One topic that has surfaced numerous times for me in the last few months is the difference between white teachers and African-American teachers. I moved districts from a mostly white and mostly middle-upper class area into Central Florida’s Seminole County, and my first experience in the public school system was at a Title I school. There definitely was an imbalance of white: black teachers, but in my first few weeks what struck me the most was the interactions between the students in the teachers. I was pretty surprised at how sternly and angrily some of the teachers spoke with the students as I never had to do that in my old district. After a little over a year in this district, I think I have chalked the main differences in interactions up to attitudinal differences.

                Perhaps I am overstepping boundaries by making this assumption, but again, this is just based on my observations with less than three dozen teachers in two schools. I noticed that the African-American teachers who were stern with their students still garnered respect and loyalty from their students, even if they were getting chewed out. However, with the white teachers, whether or not they got respect was always in the air. Sometimes, the particularly stern white teachers caused students to purposely lash out just to get the teacher upset. What I noticed was that whereas African-American teachers had an underlying tone of, “You can do better than this; you are disappointing me and yourself,” white teachers predominantly had an undertone of, “Why are you not doing what I want you to?” Again, this was not EVERY white teacher, or EVERY African-American teacher, but just the generalization I made with what I saw.

                Since observing this, I’ve made changes in my interactions with my own students. I realized that when I feel upset with my students, I really am more upset that they are not living up to their full potential or they are short-changing themselves. Situations like this sadden me. I don’t ever want to convey to my students that I’m sad they are not following marching orders because as a teacher, my goal is for the students to be the best they can be, not only follow my lead.