SUBTRACTIVE SCHOOLING

Subtractive Schooling

Subtractive Schooling

Introduction

In 1999, Valenzuela came up with the term 'subtractive schooling' to refer to the various resources that are subtracted from the educational experiences of Latino children.Valenzuela stated some of these resources to be culture andlanguage. Possibly, as a consequence, overwhelming numbers of Latino children end up dropping out of school and very few of them actually go on to enroll themselves in higher education programs. In the present times, almost 90% of the teachers in America are white monolingual women. However, there are an increasing number of children in American classrooms, who do not belong to a dominant background. It has been reported that these children are not able to perform as good as their white English speaking fellow students (Alim et al., 2008). The only explanation for this is that some white teachers discriminate within their students. In this essay, we will review the issues concerning subtractive schooling in the novel Push by Sapphire. The girl in that novel is named Precious and she currently teaches the 9th grade from the same school from which she graduated.

Background

When Precious was in her first grade, she is reported to have been mostly late for school or missed it completely. This was due to the reason that her mother did not bother to wake up early and send her to school. Her teacher at the time is highlighted to be very co-operative. Rather than scolding Precious, she always made her feel that things are never that good when Precious was not around. “My first grade teacher never acted mad at me for not coming to school. She just helped me at lunch with what I had missed the day before and she always told me how much she missed me when I didn't come to school”. This teacher of hers was a white woman herself. What we get to learn from her attitude towards Precious was that teachers should make an effort to build a connection between a child's home and school and these combined together are a child's whole universe (Dewey, 1916).

During this process, it is very essential to keep in mind that not even a second of a child's time is wasted.

The teacher's ethical and moral responsibility is to ensure that each and every child is valued and it should feel welcomed when coming to school. Precious is reported to have a few other good teachers in her life as well. One of them includes her seventh grade teacher. She stated “When I reflect on my seventh grade teacher, it was almost like it was just the two of us in the classroom. I know that's not true, but that's how I remember my relationship with her”. During her time in the seventh grade, Precious is reported to being concerned about a lot of issues. One of her uncle's died, which made her really silent as she took that death as her own father's. she had to bring up her brothers as well and take care ...