YDEV 501

 The first thing that stuck out to me from the "Willful" reading was that at the end it talks about how Sean's expressions were his way of wanting socialization and expressing underlying feelings. I try to use the teaching of not punishing children for their outbursts everyday with my students. Many of them have impulses to talk out during class or to not do work. With teenagers they have so many emotions going on at once that they don't always know how to productively express them. Punishing them for expressing emotions the only way they know how in the moment could cause them to feel like they can't express their emotions as they get older. With the second reading, it discusses the disproportionate labeling of BIPOC children as intellectually disabled or emotionally disturbed compared to their white counterparts. While there is some intersectionality between race and disability, I don't believe the two are exclusive. The assumption that they are come from wh...

 As a white woman, I don't know what my BIPOC counterparts experience in their formative years or even their current day to day life because of the color of their skin. I do however, know what to an extent what they might be experiencing because of their gender. But even that is not completely comparable. In the video, the narrator made many valid points that young girls of color are held to a different standard than young white girls. They have the characterizations of being less innocent just because they are black. Teachers won't put as much effort into their Black students to help them succeed as they will for their white students which causes the dropout rate among the black community to be higher than the white community. I've had people tell me that the students I work with are not worth it because they're not going to graduate or succeed. I refuse to believe that is true of any student anywhere. When enough adults tell a child that they are not enough or not wor...

 Having been in the YDEV community for some time, I was already aware that community-based work has come a very long way. I still get the questions "what's that?" or "what kind of jobs can you get with that?" when I tell family members that I decided to get my degree in Youth Development. I always tell them that I can do whatever I want. When thinking about the kids I have worked with in various spaces over the years, I always wonder if I made an impact on any of them or if they talk about me the way I talk about my favorite teachers. Even now, reading the second text resonates more with me since I'm working with the youth that Rhode Islanders view as "disposable" or "hopeless" and it makes me so upset when they say that. It used to just bother me before but now, it makes me physically angry because these kids are so smart. They have goals and interests just like everyone else but because they are constantly dismissed, it's chipping a...