Prompt 1- Detail of the school

My elementary school isn’t in the best of neighborhoods. As I’m driving to my placement from RIC I see that every time I take a corner, the surrounding buildings seem to get worse and worse. Abandoned buildings with boarded up windows, streets filled with potholes and ripped up sidewalks, and frequent liquor stores and family dollars seem to suddenly appear as I draw nearer to the school. As soon as I pull up to the street my school is on, the houses are average size, and they seem out of place in such a neighborhood. The building is surrounded by one way streets and no notable parking lot, so I’m forced to park on the street in a long line of cars. The school is an old building with no mention on the school’s name on the front. After I click the buzzer, the door automatically unlocks with no question of my name or reason for coming to the school.

When I walked in, there is no signage telling the location of the front office to sign in, so the first time I had to ask a passing by student, and he told me upstairs. The secretaries asked no questions, instead went on with their office tasks. There was a sign on the principal’s office door which struck me as odd on my first visit. It had cartoon children celebrating and the words “Our school met satisfactory ratings again this year!!” That automatically told me how the students do on standardized testing, how the school appreciated their “satisfactory” performance, and implies that before recently they did not even make the satisfactory requirements.

My classroom is in a basement classroom, and walking through the halls it seemed like any other elementary school. Students in line formation walking behind their teachers like ducklings, colorful pictures on the walls celebrating the students’ good class work, and small children running through the halls as teachers yell after them, although sometimes they are yelling in Spanish. The classroom I am assigned to has the children set up in U formation, with colorful decorations around the room. Although the neighborhood the school is located in, the obviously low tolerance of outsiders entering, and the “satisfactory” rating, the school seems like any other elementary school, even my own from years past.


What is valued in my classroom is respect. It is clear to see and obviously demonstrated throughout the time I've spend there. The students show respect for the teacher, student teachers, myself, and each other. Anytime the students have acted up and been rude to each other, the teacher takes each student outside into the hallway separately. After she hears both sides of the story she makes the students apologize to each other, and the teacher for the disturbance. Then students then had to work together on the project the rest of the class was paired up in. This forces the two to get along to accomplish the task they were assigned.