Some parents arrive at the office not even knowing the name of the child's teacher or their child's grade level. On several occasions, I witnessed one father arrive in the late morning at his daughter's classroom with her lunch and expect the teacher to stop teaching to meet with him and discuss his concerns at that time. He had not made an appointment and seemed unaware that the teacher was in the midst of teaching a class of young children and could not stop everything to talk with him for any length of time. An alternative arrangement might be for parents to deposit the lunches in a designated room, rather than go to the classrooms or office. Students could then pick up their lunches from a volunteer or teacher assistant at noon.

Delpit (1995) stresses the need for educators to effect social change; they must "push and agitate from the top down" (p. 40). She feels that it is the teacher's responsibility to assess the students' needs and those students who do not have the codes of power need to be taught them by the teacher. She emphasizes that simply having the children passively adopt a new code is not effective. The students must understand the value of the code they hold and recognize the power realities, to understand the need for the new code.

Acquiring Power

Delpit (1988) makes it clear that it is necessary for some of the rules to be taught explicitly for the person to understand the expectation. One cannot assume that they will otherwise learn the rules simply by exposure to situations where the rules are enforced. She argues that teaching decontextualized subskills is not a sound teaching practice that allows carryover to enable the child to participate fully in the mainstream. Instead, she stresses the importance of teaching in meaningful contexts, while learning about the arbitrariness of the codes and the power relationships they represent (Delpit, 1995).