Using Gloria Ladson-Billings and Brian Favors, answer the following questions:
What is culture? Why does culture matter? Why is culture important in classrooms? What is culturally responsive teaching? Give examples from the book, from Brian's talk, and/or from your own life of a) culturally responsive teaching and b) assimilationist teaching.
Cite heavily from the book. (This is different from quoting heavily).

Culture is an aspect that plays a huge role in everyone’s lives that consists of the beliefs as well as behaviors and other characteristics that play a common role within members of a particular group or society. Culture defines itself- as well as people and groups but they also conform to society’s shared values and in some way contribute to society- and education as well. Society itself becomes the boundary where people interact in such a way to share a common culture and this is when the cultural bond exists among people in the society where it can be racial, ethnic or even based on gender due to the shared beliefs, values and activities. Culture then becomes the factor that creates invisible bonds between members in the community, which holds people with the same cultural background, passing on values and this soon becomes relevant in education as well. Culture is concept, based on the book “Our School Sucks”. But in reality it is living and impacting everyone’s lives. Structural in equality produces social outcomes and in education, students are evaluated based on what they present as a student; bad or good, intelligent, hardworking or lazy. According to statistics, there are still great disparities between students of color and white students in academic achievement. Students of color are disproportionately presented in the nation’s dropout statistics: and more than half of the total dropout rates are students of color, despite the fact that these students make up less than 40 percent of the high school population. But there are always social consequences that are being ignored that might be playing a huge role in how and why students are acting and performing the way they are. Students of color are more likely to attend schools with inadequate resources and higher poverty rates than white students. Most students of color are also from low income households, where in such inequalities; it is hard to believe that the achievement gap doesn’t exist. Among the achievement gap, there is also the academic failure- culturally and this academic failure is based on the social consequences of color and race as well as the poor environment and it then becomes an ideology for the student: “The reason why I don’t do well is because I’m a failure. And I am a failure because I am Black or I am Hispanic”. Culture difference doesn’t exist but no one realizes that this isn’t the reason for why there are academic failures. This soon brings up the ideology of the “Culture of Failure” where it is the movement that can’t be broken and there is no break. Family background influences children on everything and if you come from a culture that has no pressure on how well you do in school, you are not going to do well. This is how culture works and plays as a role in every aspect of a child’s life in education.
In relationship, there is also the culture explanation where the culture failure talk masks the cultural structure of schools. There is a failure in meeting the equal opportunities and this is the racism among classes and it just becomes an assumption that poor students don’t like school just because they were taught to not like school. This brings up the idea that inherence is the idea that leads people to adapt to the resources around them whereas others don’t. Some students may attend highly lacking resource schools or neighborhoods, and those material conditions affect the psychological input of the students.
According to Gloria Ladson-Billings, many African American students purposely fail in school