MAGDALERA JESSA L.

PMG01

REFLECTION PAPER ON THE RON CLARK STORY!

I just finished watching “The Ron Clark Story” movie starring Matthew Perry,
which portrays the story of teacher, Ron Clark’s, first encounter teaching in inner-city
Harlem, New York. I cannot stress enough how inspirational this movie was for
someone like me, who will be a future educator. The movie shows the struggles of this
teacher, who after seeing on the news the dire need of New York City teachers, he
decides to leave his teaching position in Aurora, North Carolina, and move to NYC to
find a teaching job in a high-needs school. Once Ron Clark lands a job at a low-income,
high-needs school in Harlem, he tells the principal that he wants to teach the hardest
class who has gone through over ten teachers that year already. It was interesting to
see how the principal was stunned to see how badly Mr. Clark wanted to teach this
notoriously bad group  of students. Nonetheless, Mr. Clark walked into the classroom
and began working with this group of kids. Throughout the movie, I noticed several
interesting methods that Mr. Clark utilizes in order to get to know the students better,
connect with them and help them towards achieving passing test scores, while learning
invaluable lessons along the way. One thing that Mr. Clark did was that he visited each
of his students home prior to beginning in order to try to get a better picture of their
lives and situations. Although this didn’t go as smoothly as he had probably planned, it
did allow him to get a better feel for the community and the way in which these students
were living in their homes. At one point in his teaching experience, Mr. Clark realized
that using rap music as a means of communicating ideas with his population of students
would probably be a more effective method than regular lecturing or class discussion.
Thus, he created a catchy rap to help his students memorize the Presidents of the
United States, which served to be extremely successful with his students. As I was
watching the movie, I realized how many important issues were being portrayed in Mr.
Clark’s first experience teaching in Harlem and with that population of students. There
was doubt from the administration (the principal), there was no communication with
other teachers in the same building, students with extremely heavy issues at home
(having to take care of siblings, theft, single-parent homes, crime in the neighborhood,
etc), students with abandonment issues since they had driven out many other teachers,
a broken-down school building, vandalism, and a group full of students with deep-rooted
pain as well as failing standardized test scores. Although this movie wasn’t a
documentary, and had some fictional aspects, it truly honed in on many of the critical
issues that first-year and long-time teachers face when working in low-income, crime-
driven communities and schools. It was both motivating and inspiring to see a teacher,
such as Mr. Clark, who is very passionate, goal oriented, who have a huge patience
and have eagerness in teaching and he is innovative, energetic, and a positive role
model into these children’s lives. Although all of these children have tough exteriors,
they are unique individuals who deserve someone to come in, teach them, give them
hope that they can do anything they set their mind to, and never, ever give up on them.
Another interesting method that Ron Clark utilized in his classroom to try and set up a
stricter management, was the use of special classroom rules. Although it may appear
like it is a lot of rules for students to remember, or for the teacher ever to remember,
some are really mindless and common sense rules that students will actually find easy
to follow once they are in the flow of the classroom.

This video shows some of the ways that his academy is run and how him and his
staff have created an innovative and creative school that supports student needs.
Seeing how far teacher Ron Clark has gone is a true testament of how far one can
come in helping make a difference in the lives of inner-city students. I believe that by
learning about such teachers who have paved the way for innovative teaching is
important in order to be knowledgeable about the methods which have proven
successful with such students. It is essential to learn by example and as all great
teachers do, borrow ideas from other educational leaders and use them in ones own
classroom.

THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS!!