Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

This weeks topic has been an eye opener for me. Microaggression happen more than we really see them. I can look back and see myself many times showing some type of microaggression to someone and I really didn't realize that this is what I was doing. I can think of a time when this occur when my boys were in school and the insult came from a teacher. We all know as teachers we are suppose to have faith in our students but this one teacher really put my kids down. It was during their Junior year in high school when they were preparing for the high school graduation test. We were meeting with some of their teachers because we were conceerned about some things going on in another class not the one the teacher added his comment to. He looked at us with our kids in the room and said he knew that our boys would never pass the science part on the test because they couldn't learn it in class and they would never be able to pass that part on the graduation test. Talk about putting the boys down and how it made us feel because he was suppose to be a professional helping students to acheive their success. Well, to make a long story short they both passed aced all five parts of the graudation test the first time and for me I gave an insult back to the teacher. Working with headstart program we sometimes tend to forgot that all families are not like ours and we may sometimes look at others different. In our community we are a small comminuity weith mostly whites and africian americans. When we do get the spanish speaking families in we tend to have that look as if you all come into our world you should learn how to speak our language. This has happen often in the past few years as we have seen more and more families from another culture come into our area. I have to work on myself to learn how to help these families and find ways that I can serve them. Again, microaggression is all around us and we sometimes just don't realize what we say and do to others until it is too late. I have learned alot through this discussion this week and I plan to work on making sure that the way I approach my families and others that it is in a way that is helpful and not hurtful.