Last week I went to Meadow Valley Middle School*, an urban 6-8th grade school, to work with sixth-grader Lynn* during Ms. Smith’s* third hour special education math class. However, Ms. Smith had signed her class up to go to an assembly to celebrate Black History Month, so I attended the assembly with them. While I didn’t have the opportunity to do any tutoring, I do have some comments to make on the assembly and the reactions of the students. Going in with the perspective of a teacher, I was excited that the event was taking place and I was guessing that there would be a strong positive reaction from the students as well. The presentation was put on by three actors and actresses all performing skits and monologues with the accompaniment of a piano player, each one representing an event or era in African American history.
As the program progressed, the reaction from the students was much less enthusiastic than I had thought it would be. In the auditorium, I became aware that the students were instantly turned off by the actress who sang opera as a part of her dialogue, which is something I thought of as a unique and interesting part of the program. For the students, however, I think that opera did not fit into the context of the program in any obvious way, and it is probably not a kind of music that is generally appealing to them anyway. After thinking back a little more to the different skits, the students responded to what was the most familiar, the music from Motown. When I thought about this at the assembly, it seemed like a paradox that the students were only responding to what they were already familiar with when the program was probably meant to introduce new information. Looking back now, however, I realize that this is the same thing we try to do as educators all the time- we present new information along with content that students are already familiar with in order to help them make connections and engage in meaningful learning.
Going back to the reactions of the students, I think that another reason they had trouble engaging with some of the content of the program was because it was presented in random and disjointed fashion, without being put into any kind of historical context. For example, names like Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington were mentioned without any meaningful information to connect them to their place in history or their work. I think that, if the goal of the school was to enhance knowledge about the history of African-Americans, it would have been helpful to work in conjunction with the presenters to come up with a list of unfamiliar topics or names to talk about with the students before the assembly. This way, the students could understand more about what they were hearing that was new and, as I mentioned above, be able to integrate it with what they already knew.
* These names have been changed.
