Reflective Essay: Moving To The Classroom

Aside from college, I cannot recall a single moment in school that I felt like my voice was heard in the classroom. I went to an elementary and a middle school in American Samoa, a small island southwest of Hawaii, where the students had to learn respect first before the teachers could educate them on school subjects. We were taught to obediently listen to the teachers with fewer questions unless we were told to do so. On the summer of my eighth grade year, my parents decided that moving to the United States would be an ideal opportunity for me to receive resources to help support my education experience. I went to an under-resource high school in Bay View, San Francisco where majority of the subjects were taught by teachers that just graduated from college. In high school, teachers mainly shunned me out because I would often ask questions. It may not be critical questions about the educational system, but I would also ask questions center around issues that we were learning. Teachers would often tell me that the best way to get an outstanding award in class was to “be a nice girl and play recess like normal kids”, a normal phrase that one of my art teacher would tell me all the time as I ask her about her art work. All through my school years, I internalized the notion that I am better safe to keep quiet than …show more content…
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, he argued that they key to liberation is through critical thinking and the consciousness of the individual. He claimed that the start of this process is through education as a level of balance between students and teachers. Education should not work in status divisions where teachers are classified as subjects and in contrast, students are known as objects. Freire defined this notion of depositing information as a “banking system”. As he