JA Fair is an inner-city high school in Little Rock, AR. Classes officially start at eight forty-five in the morning and end at three forty-five in the afternoon. They are on a block schedule which consists of four class periods and lunch a day with a different set of classes every other day. During the first hour I observed Ms. Calloway in her class of Family Dynamics. There was suppose to be a guest speaker returning on the subject of abstinence but she did not show up until an hour and a half later. Ms. Calloway, not prepared to teach, dealt with one girl in the class having a spider bite and did not teach anything that class period. Most students tricked in late, five minutes?ten minutes?even twenty minutes late. Three of the students in this class slept (much like students at Harding UniversityJ). For an hour I sat listening to a couple of conversations about some students getting to tour a college that day and how worthless that was because no one was going to college. Ms. Calloway then took me down to Ms. Kat?s room to observe for the rest of the day. Ms. Kat teaches Food Science and Nutrition. During the last half of Ms. Kat?s first class, I walked around and helped a couple students find recipes in cookbooks for healthy snacks. Some students only did part of the work, some students just wrote down whatever recipe came next in the book, and some wrote down the snacks that just sounded good to them, healthy or not.
The second period was her planning period. I helped put groceries away along with her assistant. M. Kat had gotten them that morning around five or six a.m. at the designated store her school told her to use. During this time Ms. Kat told me of her formally being a gang counselor. She can relate very well to her students and still hold a position of being in charge and being respected because of this. There are around seven hundred and sixty-three people in gangs in Little Rock, of which the main two are Cribs and Bloods. Through out the day I got to hear several stories of wars against these two gangs, what the members wore, who was in the gangs in their school, and recent stories of people they knew getting killed because of the gangs.
During the lunch period Ms. Kat and I stayed in the Home economics room because students who wanted a quieter, less violent setting would come in there to eat and take refuge. Ms. Kat halved her foot long sandwich from Subway with her lab assistant from earlier and then halved the sandwich again to give to a young boy. I believe she gets more food for herself so that she can give it away without being noticed.
The third period was a cooking period that day. The students were supposed to make pizza. Almost none of them knew how to follow directions and cook the stuff or maybe they just did not want to. Ms. Kat and I went around and helped them out a little but mostly just watched. One student I the period is a seventeen year old white boy, who is physically and mentally disabled. He is very smart but needs a lot of attention and work. He is treated just like the other students and is included and participates as a regular student, except when he is too much to handle. Instead of being sent to the principal?s office he sees the Special Education teacher. He needed a lot of help with the directions on this pizza making assignment. The pizzas turned out pretty well and they got to eat what they made.
The last period, I am not quite sure what the subject was suppose to be on, but what we talked about was the recent killing of Aaron who was in a gang and trying to steal a member of another gang?s car on Thirteenth street. The students and the teacher told of horror stories and mutilations of people and several more gang stories. Ms. Kat had baked some bread all day long and sliced it up for this class to eat. The day was overall pretty scary but it was good for me to see a different type of school setting other than the Christian school I went to.
