No Test Will Tell If You’re A Good Kid

I have a student, K., in my second grade class who is one of the best kids (sweet, always reminds the talkers to “listen!”), but not one of the best students. His classroom teacher tells me he is doing well in Math, and that his reading levels have improved (though, honestly, I don’t see the proof), but his writing is still very poor. Much of his trouble seems to lie in lack of vocabulary as well as trouble with letter/sound correspondence (although he does know many sight words and is not one of the kids who forgets the word wall is there). And it appears he’s slowly starting to realize his problems are not good.

I’m not sure exactly how he began to realize his problems – if he was simply comparing himself to what the other kids were doing, or if it was because of treatment from his classroom teacher (who I have witnessed calling the so-called brighter kids “thick” and “lazy”). Whatever it is, he’s starting to feel the pressure.

We’ve been preparing them for the NYSESLAT test — which provides the same test and scoring standards for grades 2nd thru 4th! — where they’re expected to write an essay (which Teachers College doesn’t include in their curriculum), among other things they simply don’t know how to do. And today I decided to work a bit more on having them describe pictures using the words “First, Next, and Last”, which we had done before with relative ease.

Well, there was no ease today. The reading teacher was there who, truly, can be best described as a monster. She yells at the kids in a terribly condescending manner, talks extremely fast, and is terribly dismissive of their attempts at responses. It’s bad enough to be that way with native English speakers, but with ELLs, it’s simply incorrigible. I cringe every time I see her or hear her voice. She’s not supposed to even do NYSESLAT prep because she’s not licensed, but she is really over-bearing and I was in no mood to argue.

Her presence affects the whole room – which is like 10ft by 10ft with 16 kids and 3 adults when we’re all there – but I don’t know if this is why today it was all just too much for K.

I noticed that K, who has definite language deficiencies, began to tear up. So I took him out to the hallway where he began to sob. Body shaking, snot dripping, uncontrollable sobs. When I asked him what was wrong he said, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this alone!” Mind you, they had taken a practice test the week before that was even harder than the one they’re supposed to get. So, maybe he was remembering how it felt to take it. I had to explain one, that it’s okay if it’s hard – and that the test is essentially a way for me to learn how to teach him better. But he didn’t calm down until I told him that the test is just to tell us if he gets to work with a teacher like me next year. He audibly sighed with relief and comprehension. But I could tell he was still stressed.

No child this age should feel this much self-loathing* over his learning — this emphasis on performance that we place on the kids takes so much away from the actual pursuit of understanding these kids ought to have. What ever happened to wonder, to kids learning at their own pace, to “differentiation”??

*Some may say they’re too young to feel self-loathing, but I had a 6-year-old in first grade tell a classmate he hates himself because he can’t draw.

NYSESLAT – not as Bad as I thought

This week we start prepping the kids for NYSESLAT twice a week. It’s not fair for kids new to the country to be forced to take this – in fact it can be quite traumatizing (I have one little girl who had been doing great in class but is on the verge of tears during NYSESLAT prep). However, I feel I am finally being allowed to teach kids the skills, strategies and such that they need in an open explicit way without having to find ways to justify its purpose in TC’s approach. I love it.

They’re learning adjectives, adverbs (4th grade), proper sentence structure and vocab in 1st and 2nd grade, and how to write about things like who’s in a picture, what are they doing and why, or what will happen next. Test prep doesn’t have to suck the creativity and life out of a kid or a lesson — as long as you don’t let it.

Finally I feel like an ESL teacher and not a reading teacher with visuals.

I see now, more than before, how to get the kids talking in a conscious way – thinking about the language prompt and grammar. I see kids who had been the least verbal, speaking in complete sentences.

Up to now, I was spending the bulk of my time trying to find books that were not only appropriate for my kids, but interesting and challenging and would allow me to teach them the skills they need. How frustrating do you think it is for a 6-year-old who can read newspapers in Spanish to have to read books with one word on each page in English and be given a teaching point to look for character traits???

This is not a curriculum that relies on a kid’s literacy or comprehension of their first language, or even seeks to develop it. In fact, it makes it quite difficult to do exactly that.