Chicago TFA Day 5

On the fifth day in Chicago (4^th day of school, Thursday), I came in and mainly helped the students out with filling out some constitution and vocabulary worksheets. There were several students who had missed class and some had just not done their homework. As a result, while the teacher was working with the rest of the class, I spent the time working with the students behind on the material.
As the students became more accustomed to my presence, they became more comfortable with talking and asking questions about college life. This was definitely a nice contrast from the beginning of the week when most of the students just kinda stared at me and did not really like talking to me when I was helping them. They were naturally pretty shy but now, they were really interested about what I was doing in Chicago. It was shocking that they weren't really used to any outsiders coming in to their classrooms so they seemed to be fascinated by my being there. I was told by the teachers that the students don't even really meet that many non whites at all since the neighborhoods are predominately Hispanic. The teachers also explained that a few of the trouble makers come from rough neighborhoods and environments.
While I was working with a small group one instance, a couple of the students were talking in Spanish and I told them in Spanish to stop talking and start paying attention. They were immediately shocked and asked me how I knew Spanish. Once I told them I took several years of it in high school, they started to tell the other classmates that I actually knew their language so that they should be more careful when speaking Spanish if I was around. I thought that was really funny because they started to have more respect for me which implies that the teachers had a very limited knowledge of Spanish.