Schooling is the time when every student acquires precious learning and life experience. Thus, it is important to understand the impact teachers have throughout the formation of students’ personalities. The essential factors of forming mature personalities are relationships between teachers and administrators, teachers and students, and students and other students at the school.
The teachers’ behavior happens to be an exemplary model for students, although parents’ relations and attitudes are the integrative part of how the student percepts schooling. A great influence on high school students is brought by the interrelation of teachers and administrators, which forms an understanding of dominance and power over the people within a professional career sphere.
Students also perceive and form their own attitudes towards the power over them which will be directly and subconsciously transferred onto the future attitude towards their future work place or college/university learning. Moreover, the high school is the place to develop or get rid of inferiority complex and find oneself within the social groups, regarding the relations between students themselves.
As such, this paper is aimed at unveiling the behavioral patterns at High School in Inglewood, California. Namely, the examples of all the three kinds of relations mentioned above observed personally will be explained within the theme of school lunches, administrative regulations, and classroom work.
Anti Social Students and School as the Second Home
The lunches at Inglewood seem to be as noisy and relaxed as in any other high school throughout the US. However, the significant feature observed were the groups of people having their meals separately, on their own. Students seem not to care for each other at all, except for their own group members. The children of separate groups tend to wear the same style clothes, of the same color and shape.
That was a very quick observation, however if one looks more precisely there are other facts to prove the relations of students are smoothly indifferent. For example, there was a guy entering the lunch room. He saw there were no spare tables and chairs. However, there was a seat near the group of students, who were briskly discussing the up-coming party.
The guy set next to them, opened the book and had his snacks as if the group of four wasn’t there. However, while this example seems to be a display of indifference, the following one is more of the serenity of students’ souls that speaks for children forgetting about their lives in poor families when they come to school.
One of the junior students got out of her dad’s car; the dad leant out of the car window and warned that he would have no money for her spending unless she saved on her lunches.
The girl disliked the situation and seemed that it repeats every morning, because she rolled her eyes and waved her hand goodbye. Several minutes later this junior student was kidding around with her girlfriends next to the lockers as if her family did not have any financial difficulties and she did not have to care about it at all.
Administration’s Tough but Thoughtful Attitude
It was the beginning of the week and everybody was just very sleepy. Attendance office often gets many students coming in and asking for any kinds of help: starting with making a phone call home and up to medical examination by the school nurse.
So, there are multiple requests from students during the day. However, the office staff knows exactly the way to treat everyone and each, meaning that they know who usually abuses their kindness and which students really come in for help, let’s look at it with the following example.
Early in the morning the guy came in to the office and asked for a piece of scotch tape which he wanted to use to stick something to his clothes. This request was met disapprovingly by the staff, which was evident from their facial expressions and the remark: ‘Do not come here for such silly reasons any more, this is a place for helping students in need, not the time-wasters like you’.
Although, the office staff may seem rude, it appeared afterwards that they were pretty knowledgeable in what they did when another student came n to make a phone call. The boy was obviously concerned about something and the lady from administration asked him kindly what the reason was, the boy answered that his mom should have picked him up after school but did not.
They let the boy make a call and made sure someone stays until his parent come over to get the student. Evidently, attendance office has been through many kinds of good and bad experiences with the kids, though they are trying to be as fair and caring as possible. It seems that students keep coming in to the office with or without significant reason because they feel cared about in there.
Students’ Reaction to the Teacher in Class
There are those students in each class that make the teacher shiver when they come in before the bell rings. (Brucato, 2005). Those are the students that disturb the class, do not care for discipline, and simply give hard times to the teacher. From the observed class work it was possible to see that the teacher took the soft option: let the people in groups – discussed previously – sit together unless they make too much noise.
Students intentionally made a teacher put them together because otherwise they were disturbing the class even more. Therefore, a teacher had them sit together and taught the rest of the class more effectively.
Observations revealed that the teachers had a sense in pride in being able to help the kids learn and being taught to become productive adults – this was seen through the selfless mentoring and spoon-feeding of the information to the kids. In a word, teachers tend to convey their knowledge to the kids although there are obvious disturbing moments during the class.
To conclude, Inglewood was a very rich field of investigation as per relationships mater. The school does its best in order to provide students with quality education via inner rules and quality teaching. There are no tense relations either between individuals or between the groups of people. Administration carries out efficient analysis as per the children’s behavior and gives an opportunity to the students to feel cared and thought about while they are at school.
The environment in Inglewood is very friendly since the kids feel unstressed and forget about their daily financial problems. The relations between the teachers and the students are smooth, no insubordination observed. However, the extreme subordination leads to failure to comply with the rules of not coming to the attendance office without an evident reason, for example.
Reference
Brucato, J., M. (2005). Creating a Learning Environment: An Educational Leader’s Guide to Managing School Culture. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.