Thursday, February 2, 2012

Evaluating Impacts on Professional Practice

Most of my jobs have placed me in a situation where I have been the minority as the white female in the office. I am currently in a position where I am the only female and also surrounded by Hispanic co-workers. One time I was in an office with all African American females and males. I was the ranking person and was brought into the office to be in charge and run the programs. When I arrived I could not figure out why the others seemed so cold and were not very accepting of me or my ideas right from the start. It was rough for a few weeks. Finally one of the junior Noncommissioned officers told me they did not need another racist white female in charge of them. I could not believe that this group of people would automatically assume this about me without ever having known me. Of course I talked to them and through time, proved that I was in no way the type of person they had so quickly assumed I was. They then confided in me that the previous supervisor was a white female who treated them very badly and they were afraid I would do the same. That group of females became some of my best troops and I still keep in touch with them.

I believe being treated this way would and has made me much more sensitive to racism and that it is not always the perceived dominant culture imposing this bias on someone. I would probably be more prone to watch how others interact and ensure that this type of racism is not happening anywhere else. I hope not to concentrate too much on the dominant culture to ensure that “reverse racism” is not occurring there due to what parents are teaching their children.
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Established Contact with My German Childhood Professional

My contact actually changed from Tonya Schmidt to Thomas Volz. He studied in New York and Turkey. He taught school in Turkey and in Boveria at the Abuture, which they call the place of higher learning durin ghte first years. He also taught Turkish students to speak English for 4 years. He has 3 boys of his own that are 11, 12 and 15 years old. Whe I asked him to tell me about povery in Germany that he might have experienced and how it affects children, this is what he wrote to me:
"In Germany the federal social security system is (still) so comprehensive that you hardly notice any differences between rich and poor students in class. As (still) most of our schools end at 1pm, lunch, nutrition and healthcare is predominantly considered a private matter. People are very touchy about the government interfering in these questions. So it is left to health care providers to inform and teach the public on a voluntary basis. Of Course schools support this, but not as an integral part of the basic curriculum. The stress is on academic subjects".
"However, times are changing. More and more schools exand their lessons into the afternoon and the schools provide lunch. This is generally a cheap alternative to private lunch served at home. Here the schools monitor ingediences and nutrition very closely because many parents are very aware of this topic"
"The gap between rich and poor is, however, quite obvious on a higher academic level. Children that are academically supported at home are more likely to proceed to higher education and achieve better results on the long run. This more a question of how educated the parents/families are. But as education and income are unextricably entwined the link between academic achievement and income is a sad (German) fact"