Tough Realizations

It was just last year, my first year teaching first grade. The school where I teach is not very culturally diverse, 87% of the students in my school are white. My class was made up of 18 white students and 3 African American students. Teaching first graders, who rarely had a year in kindergarten or out of the house because of the pandemic, I realized not many of them were aware of different cultures and that there are people who look differently from one another.

https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2020&instid=800000050030

The moment I realized this was around Christmas time when my class was completing a color by number activity as a math center. There was a picture of a little boy carrying a Christmas tree in a wagon. Students needed to answer math equations to come up with a number, that number would tell them what color to use for certain parts of the picture. I was working with a small group when a little girl came up to me and asked me if she got an equation wrong because it was telling her to color in the little boy using a brown crayon. I explained to her that she was correct and that the little boy she was coloring in was Black or African American. She looked at me confused. She said “But nobody is black”. To this comment another little girl in my group looked at her and said “Yes there are, I've seen them in my books before”.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/FREE-Christmas-Color-by-Number-Addition-Subtraction-Within-10-992486?st=52e90186dd1eee5c089216371354ce0f

So many thoughts and questions began to race through my head; “how could their parents not have taught them about culture?” “how do they not realize there are three African American students in our classroom?” “how do I address this conversation with the class?” “how do I respond to the student in front of me?” And so so so so many more.

https://giphy.com/explore/that-is-the-question

I decided I needed to take this as a learning opportunity for me and my class. Sure, maybe their parents hadn't talked to them about these topics, but what is stopping me? We started with small conversations like “How do our families look different and the same?”. I started reading cultural books and showing more diverse videos. I started having more “uneasy” conversations with my students, knowing it was going to benefit them in the future. I really took the opportunity of Martin Luther King day to dive into the fact that people are different colors and have different backgrounds and come from different places.

https://giphy.com/gifs/mic-martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-SpBV3npJfXB96

This year, in my classroom, I decided not to wait until December to have these conversations. I started them right off the bat to help set the tone of our classroom. I realized I need to be a source of information for my students on the topic of diversity and cultural awareness as they may not have a reliable source at home.

https://news.delta.com/diversity-hands-illustration