Teach for America: My journey through it

Many times in class I ask my students to repeat after me. There are many words they have a hard time pronouncing so it is good to try altogether when we are first learning words. 

Today we were repeating Stratus. Many students pronounce it as Skratus as in Skraight…

We tried it a few times, most of them got it right. One of my female students, J* raised her hand with a smirk. “She said no offense Ms. King and I don’t mean to be racist, but ‘Caucasian’ people just talk better than black people do.” 

I think I fake fainted and she really didn’t understand that humor. I told her my mouth is no better or worse than hers and if she starts now she can speak in a professional manner. She went to argue with me and said her mother and grandmother “don’t speak like that so why should I?” 

I told her if we both went up for the same job and I used the word straight and she said skraight, who did she think would get the job…

*Also I am kind of upset she referred to herself as black and not African American while she used Caucasian for white. 

I have been teaching my kids about weather. You start off learning about the layers of the atmosphere. There is the troposphere (which we live in), stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. 

While I was showing my students a visual interpretation of the layers, one student raised his hand very confused. He asked. ” I don’t understand where heaven is.” Everyone laughed and I was not sure how to respond. 

The next day I was asking kids why clouds make rain (or how). I asked a student, who usually is not paying attention but he looked on it today. He said without skipping a beat, “I’m sorry, Ms.King but I always thought it rained because God was crying.” Again speechless.