Archive for April, 2008

last meeting with my ELL

{ April 21, 2008 @ 9:52 am } · { ELL }
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Today we had our last meeting with the ELLs. I brought an article on Africa that my ELL read in her geography class last week. We would not have had time to read the whole thing again together, so we just picked out the vocabulary words, reviewed them, and put them on our graphic organizer. It was a decent activity but didn’t take up enough time. We talked about her recent quinceañera, and eventually resorted to taking the graphic organizers we’d just made and folding them up into different shapes. After a little while of that, another ELL came over, presumably finished with his lesson with a different intern, and the two chatted in Spanish for the remaining ten or so minutes.

I felt bad about not filling our allotted time with educational content, but at the same time, I’d already overwhelmed her with vocabulary (about eight words, whose definitions we had to figure out from the context of the reading) and there wasn’t much else we could do with our article that we’d come anywhere near finishing.

If there were a next time, I’d bring a few different things that we could work on and let my ELL choose which one she wanted to work on.

literacy lesson

{ April 16, 2008 @ 9:50 am } · { teaching }
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For my last lesson, I was asked to have my students learn from text. This was a pretty challenging task, as the class is algebra and text just isn’t the main method people use to learn math. Nonetheless, with a visit to three different libraries and an hours-long search of internet materials, I managed to locate an acceptable (not great, but it’d do) text. I made the copies, created a reading guide that grabbed the main points, added admit and exit slips and my lesson was made.

Teaching the lesson went fairly well. I plain forgot to model answering the first question for the whole class, but ended up doing it for several students individually at their desks anyway. One student wasn’t really keeping up with the reading guide and just sort of stared at his paper the whole time; I assisted him in an attempt to keep him on task but he only seemed to work when I was nearby or looking at him. (He seemed really tired.) Another student who just about never does work for my cooperating teacher at all did do a bit for my lesson, which was good. A couple of the students really struggled with the reading task at hand; I emphasized that they did NOT need to read the whole article (about 3 pages total, with moderately large print) as long as they were able to find the answers to the questions on the reading guide. My real problem seems a little ironic, looking back: it was the two students who read quickly, found the answers to the reading guide without issue, and were left with nothing to do while the rest of the class was still working. I gave them the exit slips to fill a bit of the time, as the class as a whole clearly wasn’t going to get to do them. Those didn’t help much, though, and there were several minutes at the end where one student sat just waiting with nothing to occupy him. But even then, there were students who still hadn’t even started on the six math problems at the end of the lesson when I had to pass the torch to my cooperating teacher so they could do a folder check and start the math game his class plays from time to time.

This seems like a pretty easy problem to fix, in hindsight. I’d forgotten to look at how varied my students’ abilities are when I was putting my lesson together. Some really struggle with reading while others have no problem.  Maybe I should have either noticed that already, or expected the variance in a resource math class, but I guess I just didn’t think of it.

In the future, I’ll remember to adjust my assignments (especially the in-class ones, where time is such a factor) to my students’ abilities. Some are always going to be more advanced than others, and I need to expect and plan for that.

questions and answers

{ April 9, 2008 @ 9:49 am } · { teaching }
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Recently, we’ve been learning about different types of questions and ways that we can use questioning in our teaching. I particularly liked an idea in one of the handouts: teachers need not have the answers to all of students’ questions right away. The teacher can let the student know that they will research the answer to the question and come back with an answer. This shows the student that the teacher is still learning, too.

I really liked this idea of modeling how we learn and discover new things. This also connects, in my mind, to self-directed learning: if a student is wondering about something, it’s great for that student to know that s/he can go and find that answer. In the case of the particular question that the teacher didn’t know, yes, that student will probably wait to find out the answer directly from the teacher. But I think it plants the idea that we can all continue learning and growing independently, and it feels like a critical point for me as a teacher to get across: knowledge acquisition does not end when a person graduates!

In the future, I hope to be able to keep all this in mind. It’s okay not to know the answers, but it’s not okay to disregard my own ignorance when I have a chance to model this part of the learning process for my students.

geography with my ELL

{ April 7, 2008 @ 9:57 am } · { ELL }
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Today my ELL and I worked with a review sheet over Southwest Asia provided by her geography teacher. We took the information provided by the questions and answers to create a graphic organizer. This was problematic in places, but overall went fairly well. There were many words I either explained for her or worked with her to jog her memory on meanings, including a couple that I broke down with her on paper. (These words, theocracy and desalinization, I chose because I was familiar with the root words, and for “desalinization” she was able to pick out “sal” for “salt” pretty quickly as well.) We made it through the entire review just a couple of minutes before it was time to go, so we chatted a little about her classes. Algebra is  hard for her, which surprised me a little — math relies less on English skills than other subjects, but that doesn’t mean she has any natural aptitude for math either.

This all seemed pretty boring for my ELL buddy. She kept picking at her nails, and at one point asked me if it was time to go. (We still had 15 minutes.) She mentioned she went over this same review sheet with her teacher last week, but the teacher was just giving them the answers on the board, not really giving any explanations (and apparently not really getting the information into her students’ memories too well either, sadly). In between the hard vocabulary work and the repetition of having to do this same review sheet again, I had a hard time maintaining her interest in the subject at hand. She was working well with the graphic organizer at first, but as time went on her only questions were “So where do I put this?” and she wouldn’t really put any effort into figuring out where the covered subjects would best be placed. The questions on the last page were very similar to the questions already covered on previous pages in the review, so she didn’t need to write much more on the graphic organizer for them, but I didn’t feel like she was retaining any of the information, or even trying to find it if I mentioned we already wrote it down.

I’m not sure what to think about all of this yet. I feel that maybe my body language was reflecting my personal lack of interest in geography, somehow, and she was picking up on that and feeling bored accordingly. I tried to be enthusiastic about the questions at hand, but knowing what I’ve learned in class about the ways ELLs often pick up on nonverbal signals, it’s possible I was giving her hints, without my realization of it, that I personally don’t enjoy geography and feel it is a very weak subject for me.

Next time we meet with our ELLs, I’ll attempt to watch my body language more closely. (Or try to find a more interesting subject, haha.)

discipline

{ April 2, 2008 @ 9:49 am } · { teaching }
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My cooperating teacher has been sick the past couple of weeks. He was present Monday, though, so I went to his class. We had three students at first (normal head count is at least five). A few minutes after the bell, another student knocked on the door. The teacher advised me to check his pass before allowing him to enter. I checked it, it was legitimate, so he came inside. However, I failed to notice his earbuds. The teacher spotted them right away, though, and immediately told the student that he needed to walk back to the doorway, put the headphones away, and then he could join the class. The student wasn’t having it — and the teacher wasn’t having his “okay, whatever” response. Teacher kicked student out. Student proclaimed he didn’t need this class anyway. Teacher scribbled off a discipline form of some kind and had me walk it to the office. Apparently while I was gone, an assistant principal returned with the student, saying the music had been put away and asking if the student would be allowed to return to class. The teacher said no, he will not learn correct behavior if he never experiences the consequences. He added while he was telling me this that especially with students with cognitive issues, consequences need to be swift so that the student will connect his behavior with that immediate consequence, so that he can learn from the experience.

This whole scenario felt a little jarring to me. Normally my cooperating teacher is quite easygoing and flexible. But I think I understand why he acted the way he did. a) He’s sick. He feels awful. As he put it: “I don’t need this today.” b) This student chronically misbehaves, when he bothers coming to class at all. We catch him pretty frequently sticking an earbud in one ear when he thinks we aren’t looking, playing with his phone and sending text messages, and not doing his work even when he doesn’t seem to be attending to any other tasks. Plus, c) I think the teacher felt a bit disrespected, both by the student’s behavior in the past and the blatant walking-into-class-with-earbuds-on that directly caused his dismissal from class.

I think I learned a lesson about assertiveness here. In many cases, we as teachers need to be assertive or our students aren’t going to learn, and that may be applicable to more than classroom management alone…