Submitted by Hannah Horne-Fiducioso on the 2019 winter session program in Barbados sponsored by the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and the Department of Hospitality Business Management…
My first day at the Lawrence T. Gay Primary School was exciting, but also overwhelming. Once we got to the school, we sat down with the Head Mistress to discuss which age groups we would like to be placed with. The first teacher I was placed with didn’t really socialize with me, so I felt very awkward being in her classroom. The second class I was with made me a welcome poster with flowers and a puppy dog balloon, so I felt very excited to be in their class. I learned that I should not expect teachers to be as friendly as I would hope, because some teachers might not be thrilled to work with American students because of negative perceptions they might hold.
One different way of learning that I noticed through this experience was math questions that the older students were asked. In our Human Services classes at UD, we talk about how students in the same culture do best on exams, such as the SAT, when the questions are related to their culture. When I was looking at the math questions on the whiteboard, I noticed that the examples in the questions were about pounds of fish, lengths of string, coconuts, dominoes, and “tops”. I thought that was interesting because in the United States, we probably would not ask those same math questions using those same examples.