Context

For my placement i’ve been placed at Cesar Chavez. The school is located in the heart of

the Hispanic part of Grand Rapids. Cesar Chavez is located off of a main road, that’s surrounded

by many homes. Most of the students live in the neighborhoods right around the area, I’ve seen a

majority of the students walking from the neighborhoods to the school. The younger students

tend to have their parents walk with them or have an older sibling walk with them. My teacher

told me that the school does have one bus, the bus picks up a few students who live further away,

but the majority of the students live in the neighborhoods across, behind or near the school.

The characteristics of the community appear to look worn down, the neighborhood is lo-

cated in an older area. The houses are crammed next to each other with barley any front years. A

lot of the houses are chipped and cracked, they have major roofing problems. The only new look-

ing build in the area is the school. The school seems very out of place, with nice new bricks walls

and large glass windows, everything else is a lot older.

Cesar Chavez Elementary has grades as young as kindergarten to 5th grade in their build-

ing, the school has a variety of teachers in the classroom. Some classrooms are all English based

teaching, where both teacher and students speak English, while other classrooms have 50/50 per-

cent. The teachers will speak both Spanish and English in the classroom and then there are a few

classrooms where teachers are only speaking Spanish with the students. The school is very di-

verse in this area. In the classroom the ratio between most of the classroom is 1 teacher to 19

students, give or take depending on the age of the classroom. Some of the statistics that I notice

while doing some research about Cesar E. Chavez is that the minority enrollment is 98% of the
student body (majority Hispanic), which is higher than the Michigan state average of 34%. The

schools percentage of Hispanic students is at 80% Hispanic, 15% African American, 2% White

and 3% other. Comparing the school to the Michigan State status the school is in the bottom 50%

for overall school ranking. Michigan’s standards for math test scores are suppose to be at 39%

while the school is rated at 9%, which is very low. The same low rate appears in the reading/ lan-

guage arts test, Michigan standards at 49% while the school is at 14%. 90% of the school is eli-

gible for free lunch. (Public school reviews, 2020)

My kindergarten classroom has 22 students, 9 girls and 13 boys. Most of the students are

about 5-6 years old, the majority of the girls are hispanic, while the majority of the boys are

African American. As far as I know of my students in the classroom come from rough family sit-

uations. The teacher has talked about how the parents are very hard to get in contact with be-

cause they are bust trying to provide for the family. A few of my students live with their grand-

parents because parents are not in the students lives which was hard to hear. I have not heard

much faith talked about in my classroom, nor do I know if my students know anything about re-

ligion, they never mention anything about it.

The majority of the students are low in academics, they tend to struggle in understanding

concepts. In the classroom most of the students are internally motivated, they don’t want to par-

ticipate unless there is a reward at the end of the activities they are learning. I have noticed that

there is one student in my classroom, who is externally motivated. The teacher has talked about

her motivation for the classroom, and how she wants to learn and she likes learning and that has

been noticed in the classroom. She gets all of the activities done, with in the time limit and she

focusses and is wants to achieve the goals that the teacher sets for the classroom. There is anoth-
er student who is also very academically smart but she is repeating kindergarten and the teacher

talked about how she think it has set the student back. The student already knows what is being

taught so she gets bored easily and misbehaves at times. In my classroom there is a group of

about 7 boys who are very unmotivated in the classroom. They have a very hard time learning,

but it’s because they don’t care about the material that is being taught. The teacher often tries to

remind them that she isn’t doing this for herself, but for them because she already knows these

things and she wants them to learn. The group of boys don’t seem to care, they have a very hard

time getting the activities done. It’s hard in the classroom because although the teacher tries to

separate the group of boys so they don’t bother each other they often are walking around or sit

close enough to each other to distract each other and not get there work done.

Cesar E Chavez Elementary School Profile (2020): Grand Rapids, MI. (2020). Retrieved Feb-
ruary, 2020, from

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/cesar-e-chavez-elementary-school-profile/49503

Cesar E. Chavez Elementary. (2020). Retrieved February, 2020, from

https://elementaryschools.org/directory/mi/cities/grand-rapids/cesar-e-chavez-elemen-
tary/261644005319/

User, S. (2019, September 25). Super User. Retrieved February, 2020, from

https://www.grps.org/cesarchavez