A key difference I encountered while at Thomas Lay was how students responded to authority. If  I were to so much as raise my voice with children from my affluent Chicagoland suburb, immediate change in behavior would likely occur as the children from my upper-class, predominantly white town are taught to respect outside authority and to follow the rules accordingly. 

This was not the response I dealt with at Thomas Lay. Students were quick to act out as means to gain attention from peers and mentors and it was extremely difficult to reprimand students in a manner that was both effective and created a reason for students to not act out again. Myself growing up would cry if my parents so much as threatened to send me to the “naughty chair.” At Thomas Lay, students were unphased and often even more defiant when presented with the possibility of a time-out as a punishment. 

This behavior can be attributed to how these students view themselves and the environment in which they are raised in. As American linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath documented through her 1982 study entitled What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school, students from black families experienced different styles of parenting, discipline, and overall engagement with peers and adults. The black students were not equal participants in communication with parents and were often talked at or talked down to. This greatly varies from the communication standards I was raised with as I felt encouraged to talk with my parents and was taught to be respectfully vocal when conversing with parents, teachers, and adults in general. Particularly, Heath documented this behavior when it came to activities such as reading children’s books. Similarly at Thomas Lay, problems often arose when students were expected to sit down and read their chosen books. Students were disengaged, not wanting to read and in turn, acting out to demonstrate their disdain for this part of the day. It took coaxing and sometimes reprimanding to ensure the students would read aloud and much of the communication between mentors and mentees was met with frustration throughout read-aloud time. Since I grew up reading bedtime stories with my parents, I was conditioned to engage with works and talk about the stories with my parents. I was taught that reading was fun and enjoyable throughout my childhood… my habit of pulling all-nighters to finish books was the only source of conflict surrounding reading in my household. But, if one grows up without this experience and this learned appreciation for reading in this way, one may not develop interest for reading. Furthermore, when facing conflict regarding the lack of interest in reading, the communication styles between mentors and mentees greatly varied as I expected the mentee to communicate with me to solve the problem, treating me as the authority figure. Yet the mentee could very well be taught at home to communicate differently and handle expressing themselves differently, demonstrating a disconnect in our respective communication styles.

My experience was affirmed throughout the study as these expectations were found to be a norm among white students and families. Heath’s findings about differing cultural norms among different socioeconomic groups and their connections to race we discussed in class related with my close interactions with Thomas Lay students as the students struggled to effectively communicate with adult. The prospect that many of them could be accustomed to being talked down to at home, thus normalizing communication with possibly negative expression, made it difficult for them to positively express themselves and difficult for mentors to know how to properly discipline students when they acted inappropriately or acted disengaged with the tasks at hand (including the twenty-minute reading requirement dreaded by most students) .

Drawing from my childhood experience and my experience of correcting child behavior was not effective here.  I realize that in these moments, I had been swimming in my own culture, frustrated when threateningly counting down from five before sending someone to the “red chair” (time-out chair that annoyingly was actually a chair green in color) was ineffective in producing improved actions. The way my parents communicated with me and disciplined me is not the “right” way nor is it the only way. As a mentor, I was encouraged to use this realization --that would not have been made without this course--  to adapt my communication with students and understand that the likely differences between our home-lives could contribute to some differences in what “normal” behavior is perceived as. I should not penalize a child for behaving in a way that is not customary to me; I should recognize their behavior and motivate them to be who they are in a way that is not hurtful to others or themselves when misbehavior occurs. 

Upon mentoring at Thomas Lay, I  realize that many of the students there do not have access to this type of capital. When chatting about upcoming summer plans, many of the students talked about how much TV they were gonna watch. No mention of summer sleepaway camps, vacations to beaches, or junior golf lessons were mentioned. Cultural capital serves as a major source of social inequality. Certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others, and can help or hinder one’s social mobility just as much as income or wealth (Cultural Capital, 2016). It is advantageous to have the same taste in movies, participate in the same summer camp traditions, and play the same sports as the majority, just as advantageous as being able to afford a degree from an Ivy League School is—this phenomenon creates a sense of collective identity and group position (“people like us”). When minority students are barred from this cultural capital, they are both viewed and treated as lower-class, thus hindering their sense of self and their overall social mobility. 

While listening to a student read E.B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web aloud, the page read “Fern came almost every day to visit him. She found an old milking stool that had been discarded, and she placed the stool in the sheepfold next to Wilbur’s pen.” In my mind, I can easily visualize a young girl grabbing a stool to sit outside of a pig pen. I see a barn, hay on the floor, wood beams used to form the fence around the pig. I can picture a trough in the pen and likely a tub of water. I do this process effortlessly. My ten-year-old student mentee does not do the same. He asks what it means by “Wilbur’s pen.” Why would a pig need a pen? What is he writing? While this is definitely a case of a homophone confusion, it also revealed disparities in our culture capital. I explain that the pen is not a pen one would use to write with, rather an enclosure for an animal. “Have you ever been to a farm and seen the fences that keep the animals inside? It’s just like that” I say, trying to make the pigpen more tangible in his mind. Yet, it has the opposite effect. “I’ve never been to a real farm” he shares.  “Oh, okay!” I think to myself. “Hmm, have you ever seen animals gated off in the zoo?”. Again, no. Growing up, I had a yearly membership to the Brookfield zoo where I could see around 450 species of animals. I had been to the zoo’s farm exhibit and had been to farms for field trips and while visiting relatives in Kansas. These experiences added to my cultural capital and made interpreting and visualizing the idea of a pig pen uncomplicated. For my mentee, he had to stop reading, think about why a pig would need a pen, and struggle to envision the living conditions of a pig at a farm. This pause in his reading demonstrates a significant gap in lower-class and middle-class experiences and implies that my mentee could struggle to understand other ideas presented in popular culture not on the basis of lacking intelligence, but on the basis of lacking a position in the dominant culture.