this year so far..

Tomorrow is the fifth grade NY social studies test. I will have hopefully three translators in the room, plus myself. There will be a Chinese, Bengali, and hopefully an Indonesian translator. I will be providing the Spanish. I say hopefully because I don’t know if my school has been able to track down an indonesian translator. Practically nothing exists in Indonesian here.

Of course none of this really matters since I really doubt they teach much American history in those countries, but at least they may be better equipped to make guesses and may be able to do the essay question. That is a big maybe since that assumes they were able to learn something from all the English instruction they’ve been getting.

Not sure if I mentioned this earlier but I am teaching a free-standing fifth grade this year and it is the mecca for all beginners and newcomers it seems since out of a total of 28 kids, roughly 19 are beginners and 10 of them are new to the country as of September. The rest are new as of last winter, and small minority have been here two years.
My attitude about this year’s position moves back and forth between sugar and shit quite easily. Some days I am proud at what we’re able to do as a class and I recognize what I am able to provide them and then other days I feel overwhelmed, like my supervisors expect me to do wonders.

Part of the “problem” is that I had a huge success last year, with a class of kids who came in reading level E and left reading level Q. That is like 2 years worth of progress or something. But this year I have more true beginners, so the challenges are very different.

One thing that makes me feel good is that even though I am a new teacher I feel like I have been given a most important class. These are kids who would easily languish in a regular classroom. But sometimes it feels like I was given these kids because no one else knows what to do with them.

For example: there is this other fifth grade teacher who has a student who went back to his country for most of last year and he basically didn’t go to school the whole year. He reads a low level, maybe a J, and he his behavior reflects not having gone to school. So she has told her supervisor she doesn’t know what to do with him. I fear I will be given this kid, but then I had the chance to look at an example of his writing and he is far more advanced linguistically from any of my students! He easily uses past and past perfect tenses, as well as idioms and expresses ambiguity with comments like “she seemed angry with me…” This same teacher teaches my kids math after school, and she asked me, after her first afternoon with them, if they speak English. What?? Out of the 7 she has, only 2 don’t understand English. The rest.are beginners, and one advanced and they never have a hard time in my class. I have clearly come to take for granted the way I and others know how to ask questions in different ways – I guess? I mean, what else could be the reason. In her comments, she insinuated my kids are dumb and can’t even understand their first language.

Why is is that the same things I find thrilling and intriguiging about this job are also the things that drain me?

What are you teaching this year? What are the obstacles that have been weighing on you?

Halfway there…

So, 56% of my students are “approaching grade level” in reading (according to the Teachers College Readers Assessment Project), 5 are at grade level, and 5 are considered “in need of support”.  As most readers know, I teach a self-contained ESL classroom, so while there are grade-level benchmarks, my students also have personalized goals called AYPs (A Year’s Progress). For ELLs, the goals is for them to make a year and a half’s worth of progress because, typically, they are that far behind and then some. So, while we can say that 61% are still “below grade level”, the majority have made and even surpassed their AYP.

The first column is their reading levels when they entered third grade. For those who don’t know, A-I is generally first grade. I-L is second grade. M-Q is third grade.  The ones who met or exceeded their AYP are in green (as I recall anyway – I don’t have the sheet in front of me to reference). As you can see, many of my students moved from first grade level to third grade in half a year.

I hate to say it, but I have no idea if these kinds of leaps are normal (anyone know?), but I’m told that the percentages in my class are “practically that of the general ed” classes at my school. I put that in quotes since basically all our classes are majority ELLs, just that the general ed ones tend to have more advanced ELLs. The majority of my students are Intermediate and Beginner. I’m very proud of their progress and excited to see how much further they go. ELLs tend to “stall” at level M at our school, and more broadly at level N because the language tends to get more idiomatic and difficult for them — they get the gist, but not the deeper meaning. So, we’ll see where they end up in June. Of course, thanks to the way Teachers College assesses students, the major leaps they made don’t matter when it comes to their report card. Only the benchmarks used to assess native speakers matter.

F	I
F	L
I	L
K	M
H	M
F	L
H	M
I	N
I	L
C	E
L	N
F	H
H	J
I	M
K	M
F	L
F	L
E	J
K	N
E	N
I	M
F	N
G	L

NYCTF: Debates, Distortions, and Discoveries

NYCTF

Whether it is on someone’s blog or a TESOL listserv, I always seem to find myself having to defend the NYCTF. It’s not an enviable position, especially when half the time it’s not to dig into actual flaws of the Fellowship, but to dispel rumors and myth! How exhausting to have to explain to people who talk about such things as “nyctf grad schools” as if the Fellowship has created their own colleges, or who make comparisons between Fellows and experienced teachers with years of teaching under their belt, as opposed to new teachers. There is plenty to say about alternative certification programs, their necessity, their rigor and how their participants are interacting with veteran, traditional-route teachers and vice versa.

However, I will say that through the process of wading through all these misperceptions in a recent tesol listserv back-and-forth, I have found ESL teachers who are really, truly passionate about what they’re teaching, how ESL teachers are being trained and how the students are being serviced. That has been truly refreshing since 8 of out 10 of the ESL veteran teachers at my school once criticized me for working too hard on my lessons, and who made it very clear that their favorite part of the job, aside from vacations, is administering the NYSESLAT test since, for 3-4 weeks, all the push-ins do is testing — no time for teaching.

With all that said, please feel free to post all your questions, comments, criticisms of the Fellowship and expect a response complete with personal anecdotes from my experience and what I have learned from other Fellows, coupled with more objective thoughts. Or if you find blogs by other Fellows, or posts about the Fellowship, please do share as I am always interested in reading on this topic. I have tried, at times, through this blog to give you a sense of my experience in the Fellowship from Day 1 and appreciate when others do the same.

Most crucial language lesson

“We screw up royally by making people feel they don’t have a mighty important role in contributing to their children’s education,” she says. “Don’t do it by assimilating children into a language in such a way that they’ve got to put aside their native language to succeed in school. We do that at our peril.”

“What do teachers need to know?” she asks. “They need to know how a language is learned, what role they’ve got to play in supporting it, how languages work and how they differ. It’s akin to a school of medicine turning out doctors who’ve never had a course in anatomy. You just wouldn’t do that.”

-Lily Wong Fillmore, San Francisco Chronicle (July 18, 2004)

Taylor Mali – “What Teachers Make”

Inspiration before going back to work

more about "Taylor Mali – "What Teachers Make"", posted with vodpod

What about that meeting in a basement…

The title is half a joke. In one of my grad school classes, we were discussing NCLB and standardized tests, particularly in how they relate to ELLs and bilingual students/newcomers, etc. Immediately, one of my classmates had a moment of clarity and began talking about how she was going to organize a meeting in her basement to get teachers and parents to demand a boycott of these tests. It was said partly in jest, and partly in frustration.

So, seeing this post on a fellow teacher’s blog really has me wishing such things would really happen here. I have to say, I had never even thought of random sampling as an alternative to every child being tested! I don’t know if it’s the most popular alternative on this side of the border – or the best option – but it’s certainly an approach that would allow for scientific analysis (leaving aside the debate over the validity of the tests, however).

My favorite quote:

Lanzinger said teachers may be employees, but they are also professionals. “We are not going to do something that’s bad for students and bad for public education.”

“Survivor” – Teacher Edition

Last year, I received this really hilarious spoof, putting “Survivor” in a classroom and was just now reminded of it after reading this. What really made me laugh, of course, was that this “Survivor” is exactly what being a Teaching Fellow is like.

There are plenty of jobs that require you to multi-task, do thankful errands for little pay, take work home, etc., (ask any production assistant), but teachers are expected to be thankful for it all because of the “joy” the job provides in working with children.

This particular line from this spoof, however simple, really hit home after reading that second article:

The business people must continually advance their education, at their expense, and on their own time.

After reading the article that reminded me of this, I decided that the “Survivor” piece should add to that sentence, “as their salaries simultaneously fail to meet the economic demands caused by simple, everyday life.”

The piece also should describe how teachers are expected to buy anything their classroom may lack.

A Must Read

A Race to the Bottom by Bob Herbert

Where did it go?

I knew teaching was going to be a lot of work – especially compared to my last job – but I didn’t know it was going to almost completely obliterate my social life. I bring so much work home (and apparently this is odd?) that I am lucky to get it all done before going to sleep by 11pm so I can at least get 6 hours of sleep. Aside from other Teaching Fellows, there’s no real way or chance for me to get to know other teachers. Some are definitely cliquey and haughty but not all (and some of those are too old really for me to become close to). And yet socializing just doesn’t happen.

Am i crazy? One other teacher, my saving grace, who is also new and lots of fun does take work home and seems as overwhelmed and ambitious (for our kids) as I am, but we seem to be a rarity. Another new-ish (she’s in her third year) teacher, who is also a Fellow says she does NOTHING she can’t do in the morning at school or on her prep.

Seriously – how and when do you prepare if not after school?

so alone

I am sitting in front of my class as they try not to fidget in the meeting area. My chart, with it’s ready-made, uniform Teaching Point, hangs beside me on my easel. But I know it won’t connect. I know there is more I must do for my students to make sense of this and work with the lesson to actually learn something. But I had not thought this through enough until now. I resent the fact that our majority-ELL school is using this Teachers College curriculum that has to be reconfigured and adjusted at every turn for it to even come close to what our students needs. I am unprepared because I hadn’t thought this lesson through enough.

sigh … I often use my art skills to improvise visuals. But I hate myself when I am this unprepared. The weight of knowing how far behind these students are and how much each moment matters often makes my heart race.

My partner has at times criticized me for being too passionate or caring too much. I feel like a person would collapse under all this pressure if he/she didn’t care as much as I do and feel as responsible as I do. I think then is when people start to burn out. You aren’t completely spent until you allow yourself to become ineffective. I am so conscious of not wanting to remain there – in that moment, with materials I need, and yet still feeling lost and ineffective. I want to do this right. And I often feel alone in that urgency and that desperate need – and that feeling of being so inadequate. I go into some teachers’ classrooms and they look so well put-together and then I hear them say they do nothing at home to prepare. How do they do it all? I struggle just to keep up with all the paperwork, the notes I’m supposed to keep on kids, the papers to grade, the homework to check, the lessons to write (and not just the lesson for each class but also for each small group strategy lesson)…