Group Differences Discussion

I really enjoyed the discussion over the different topics and how they pertain to education. It was interesting to see how students are affected by these topics and how I will have to deal with them as a teacher. I was aware of these sometimes controversial issues, but I had never spent much time thinking about or discussing them. The discussion I helped lead was the one on rural populations. It was eye-opening to me to read about how the systems instituted to fix the social problems often assume people have social problems. This is not always the case, and it would be more beneficial in most cases to change the system to fit the people instead of trying to change the people to fit a system.  It was also interesting to learn about how students from different cultures interact in school systems. One of the articles stated that often if a student from one culture is transferred to another they often become socially isolated. Furthermore, classrooms with a multicultural population often become somewhat segregated. In order to fix this teachers and schools are looking into cross-cultural education. This allows students to learn about other cultures and appreciate the uniqueness of their own culture. 

I think the discussion in class often followed what the articles stated and argued. I think it was difficult for the class to come up with a solution to fixing the problem in rural areas, and that difficulty resonated with the articles. There is no easy solution, and I think through the class discussion that was made more obvious. I think it surprised me that some of the students in class were not aware of the problem with nearby rural education systems or recognize the cultural differences. One think that might have helped make this more visible would have been to present statistics on dropout rate and literacy rates in the Appalachian area. As a teacher I will face many of these group differences discussion topics in my classroom. This discussion helped me build a foundation about these topics that I can further improve upon in order to help me in my future classrooms when addressing the lifestyles and culture of my students.