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?

Taylor Mali – “What Teachers Make”

Inspiration before going back to work

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“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

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)…

test prep as a genre?

I agree so much with some of the comments in this post on a fellow teacher’s blog, –  the ELA does not so much test how good a reader a child is, but tests how good they are at taking reading tests. The differences in reading levels among my students is quite significant – I have students who read level E/F (books that don’t even have dialogue) and students who read level M (which has chapter books). And yet some of my lower-level students score better than my students who are on level M (which is grade level). Some of my lower readers are actually more critical readers and better at these tests for various and many unknown reasons.

Three different parts of our curriculum – reading, writing and read aloud – are for test prep. We are to take away one period of two other subjects for test prep as well.  While teachers get criticized for teaching to the test, that is exactly how we are curtailing the students’ education.

If we were true advocates for our students, shouldn’t schools be opposing these tests and organizing parents to do the same? And there are so many legitimate research-based reasons to oppose these tests – whether you choose to look at it from the point of view of ELLs or not.  On the other hand, my school knows historical fiction, fairy tales, fables, legends, poetry, biography, etc., may be on the test, and yet they choose to spend two whole months on Fiction and one whole month on non-Fiction, leaving just days to teach each of these other genres.

test prep

I know I’m not alone when I say I hate test prep, that time of year in third grade and up when 80% of instruction is focused on teaching strategies for taking state-mandated tests like Math or English Language Arts.

But I don’t just hate it because it is mindless, scripted lessons. Sometimes its nice to have lessons that are already worked out even if they still have to be tailored. And I often feel like my own lessons fall flat anyway. But what really bothers me is it makes me feel so incompetent.

The lessons and teaching points we are given are so poorly written and organized that we are setting the kids up for failure. Like the first time we teach kids about historical fiction, it is to focus on the types of questions asked. There is no time to spend to really dig into it and read some. And then that is it. Maybe one other lesson talks about historical fiction. This is the equivalent of cramming except usually when you cram for a big test, it is both your choice and with material you have had some prior experience with. At first I honestly just thought it was me. That I am inexperienced and disorganized and that’s why it hasn’t been working well but the reading teacher told me all the teachers are having a hard time with it!

Talk about setting the kids up for failure…