Unlike some of the other grouping of students we have evaluated, this particular combination of students (i.e.

Arab-American and Asian-American) who we are to address in terms of teaching strategies present a unique challenge to the classroom teacher. Frankly the challenge really has nothing to do with the students themselves, per se, but more to do about the perceptions and attitudes towards these students by other students and even teachers. These attitudes could be fueled by something as simple as how the Arab-American students choose to dress or how the Asian-American students look featurewise. The primary reason that Arab-American students are at a particular risk is likely a function of the recent history of conflicts the U.S. is involved in with various Middle East cultures over the past several years. In my school, many students are from Air Force families, so resentment towards the Arab-American students may be much different than what other schools may experience. Nonetheless, from a classroom management perspective, the most important thing that we can do is to not allow any offensive behavior to be tolerated. While we certainly do not want to make an international episode out of any minor incidents, we must be quick to make it perfectly clear that we will not tolerate any inappropriate bullying of Arab-American students and we need to do so with as positive of an attitude as possible. Our goal is to eliminate any prejudicial behaviors as early as possible so that all students will have a positive learning experience. Now, the Asian-American students face similar issues but for completely different reasons, mainly their obvious Asian-like appearance whether they are native born or immigrants really does not matter appearance-wise since they will likely still have the undeniable Asian features. The main thing to remember is that not all Asian-American students are high achievers and not all will fit this typical model Asian stereotype. As such, we must be very careful as teachers to not place inappropriately high expectations upon the Asian-American students and we must spend time to understand their particular learning style, just as we do with all other students. For both of these groups of students, things that we need to pay particular attention to is that both the Arab-American and Asian-American students may not be inclined to work well within their own designated cultural grouping. While the reasons for this are many, keep in mind that the Arab-American and Asian-American groups are fairly generic categorizations and there many diverse sub-cultures within each of these groups that simply do not get along and have not gotten along for eons. For instance, the Arab group includes a frequently assumed religious affiliation with the Muslim faith even though most Arab-American individuals in the U.S. are actually Christian (over 60%) rather than Muslim (around 25%). The Asian-American groups are also associated with Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Christian (just to name a few) but their actual religious association will usually be influenced from which region of the Asian grouping they are linked with.