I hope this book wrecks my philosophy...

What does it mean to be a good educator? As a future educator, I have consistently been asking myself this very question as I sift my way through a college education. At times I must take a step back and wonder, are all these methods and strategies that are constantly being thrown at me really going to be what I use in the long run? I see a great disconnect between what I am being taught and what I see when I enter a classroom. Teachers are being sucked away from what they know is best by the whirlwinds of standardized testing. A good educator desires to do what is best for every child. However, we often settle for what is the common good. The majority of our students are from a certain class or race or other group, so we determine that it is best to do what will suit the majority. Are the other children in our classroom really getting the opportunities they deserve? In Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children many of these questions come to the surface. As I question and reflect on the points she makes, I first begin to think about the title in itself. What does it mean to me to teach other people's children? First of all, I have to wonder at thinking about them as "other people's". Automatically, my mind turns towards people who are "other" than myself, such as those of a different ethnicity. The more I reflect on this the more I must think that I should come to view these children as if they were my children and learn to know what they need in the same way. The educational system that we have grown up in and are a part of reflects the values of our predominately white culture, or at least predominately white in the educational world. When our nation contains so many different ethnicities, cultures, and races, how can our educational culture still remain so heavily influenced by middle class white people? I believe that to an extent I have been blinded to the cultural bias I myself have. I must find a way to uncover these biases and learn from them. I have much to learn in this area and books like this tend to wreck my life, my philosophy, and my view point, in a good way. I have a feeling that reaching each child in my classroom is a much bigger task than writing a few adaptations at the bottom of my lesson plan. As I learn, I can only hope to question everything that I've been told in order to gain a better understanding of how I can care for all the children in my classroom.