I received a christmas card from my shyest Chinese student that had an unintended effect. Clearly it was chosen for the cheerful-looking tree on the cover but the card was in Spanish and said “para mi nieto” and while I was VERY touched he got me anything – it was completely unexpected – it made me so sad and frustrated.

It’s no wonder so many immigrants go to live in communities of their own cultures – because some of my students’ families are not only learning to make their life in english but spanish too because of where in queens they are! How overwhelming and alienating that must be. It doesn’t really have to be, but considering all the strains thy no doubt deal with, that can’t help. It’s not like our school (or, I imagine, the community) offers classes to help with these kinds of things.

So many Americans look at new immigrants with distrust and distaste for “isolating” themselves in their own communities, and I just need to exhale a little tangential disgust here at the ahistorical, bigoted ignorance this stems from.

And secondly, it makes me sad that I have not taught them enough yet to distinguish spanish from english or at least to look for english words to help them make sense of things :(

If being bilingual was seen as a priority for all students, NYC would see their huge population of ELLs as an asset and would be compelled to allocate funds to maintain their biliteracy.

Until then, we will be expected to judge them solely as students who do not yet know English, and who have to learn it, even at the cost of them losing their native tongue.

I told my class on Monday that we’d be learning sign language as our class project and I can’t believe how excited they were and how much initiative some of them took.

This is one major part of our curriculum where I really have total control and I’m very excited myself. I am going to teach them poems and songs and even some mother goose rhymes using sign language.

My table that consists of my chinese speakers and some high-generating spanish- speakers was particularly unleashed. One student at that table bought a Mother Goose book of rhymes to share, and my very shy student, YL, actually stood up and demonstrated to the class how to sign his word! I had given each student two words to learn to teach to the rest of the class, and with prompting from his friends at the table, he stood up, faced the class and showed them “clean”. He even let me hi-5 him! This, a boy who hides his smiles and normally won’t look at me. This class holds a lot of promise and potential.

In teaching ASL, it also offers me a way to teach nouns, adjectives, and verbs, which otherwise are not in our curriculum and which I find helpful when learning a new language. Yay :)

using Chinese within sentence frames

As I have mentioned previously, I have 9 students who speak languages in class that I don’t – Indonesian, Chinese, and Bangla. I also have Urdu and Pashto speakers but they have a little more English than the others, much like most of the Spanish speakers in my class of 28.

The majority of these new students are Chinese-speaking. Initially, I had them seated in pairs but mixed into other tables. I did this mixing thinking it would encourage more English usage, which it seemed to, but they were very disconnected from the class; like they were inside a bubble that they’d breach only rarely.

However, during a spelling bee last week, I had them all together at one table. Their job was to follow along with the written words as students, lined up, spelled them, and they were to raise their hands when a word was misspelled. I wanted to see if they knew the letters, and two did. Two others were able to follow along, though, and maybe didn’t feel comfortable raising their hands.

During this bee, I noticed that while they may not have been speaking in english, there was more language learning happening – they were closer to the front of my class and discussing, working out together what was going on.

So, this week, I created a table of 9 – with the 6 Chinese speakers plus 3 Spanish speakers, right at the front of the room. This also allows me to pool my resources – bilingual dictionaries and such – and focus on what troubles they may be having.

One thing we are working on right now are biographies of a person they know. I always put sentence frames on the board but now I add Chinese as a guide. It’s a bit mechanical but I feel it has to be right now because they simply can’t do sentences or even put the right english word after a frame on their own. I also put photocopied entries from our dictionary as part of the word wall.

I don’t know Chinese but I have studied Japanese, so I have some understanding of the use of characters and I assume the syntax is much the same, and therefore quite different from English. So I don’t know exactly how their translations work, but I primarily rely on one other Chinese student (who arrived to the country last year) who speaks Beginner English. Not only does this seem to help, but they are far more engaged during class. I think, on some level, they feel like valid participants in the class. I have also been trying to learn some chinese and they have been helping me with my pronunciation, which I think also helps make them understand that I value their language and am also comfortable making mistakes!

Using the first language is always crucial, if frowned upon by some, and really not easy when you don’t already know it yourself!

Last week my principal was supposed to come observe me but she never came. She came today and I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. I am feeling so bummed. I had a really great lesson planned that would have pleased her to no end but I didn’t do that one because our students in 5th grade have to create certain things as part of the biography unit and I decided at the last minute that if I didn’t explicitly teach how to do that, they wouldn’t be able. But given it was last minute, it wasn’t executed as well as it could have been.

And it is admittedly chaotic in my room. I have kids reading in groups or partnerships for about 10-15 minutes in biography and then they transition to spend the rest of the time  reading fiction. At that time, some of my Newcomer ELLs go do work with Imagine Learning on the computers, which I still have to set up for them to be able to use. My levels range from -A to P, so it is all a big challenge for me. It’s like a one room schoolhouse. And part of me feels like —*shrug* —let her see it in its most natural state. I am new and definitely am functioning beyond my strengths in many ways (beyond my own personal “zone of proximal development”, so to speak).

Other teachers tell me I should have a para and other supports, given their needs. I honestly don’t know about all that, but managing it all during Readers is definitely where some of my weakness shine. I just have to remind myself she has gotten some favorable reviews from other APs past and present.

UGH

Update 12/02: I have my post-observation this coming Monday! Oh me oh my…