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 :(

Well, I am back to 28 kids because although I got one new student from Puerto Rico, one of my Chinese boys left to go to a school in Flushing. The boy from PR told me he is glad he is no longer there because there were “a lot of shooting”. He speaks and understands english but clearly is not yet comfortable in it and is more comfortable when he can have things repeated to him in Spanish.

One thing I have noticed is I have a much wider pool of kids I can draw from to re-teach or partner up with others who don’t understand what’s going on. I like to rely on kids for that purpose for a lot of reasons – it’s like a mini-assessment for the re-teacher; I don’t have to repeat myself; they often feel less pressure with peers. And so, lately, that group of potential re-teachers has grown quite large – not because more understand what I’m teaching though that is true too, but because of growth in oral language skills. Pairing kids up, allowing talking at different times, and being patient in terms of initially having to repeat a lot all helped. It meant doing a lot of listening and coaching in, but hey who doesn’t need things repeated when they are learning it for the first time, especially in a new language.

One of the least obvious* things that has seemed to give the oral language a boost for some kids has actually been the sign language project! It is one thing they are all new to and it has given them a tangible way to learn new words.

I have a fingerspelling center for during readers that I think may help boost word recognition and spelling. Here is how it goes, each team has two partners – A and B. Each partnership has a list of high frequency words. One partner chooses a word off the team list and fingerspells it. The partner has to guess the word. If they guess correctly, they win 2 points. If they guess wrong, they lose one point. Whoever has the most points between the teams wins and gets to put their name on the “high scorer” list (like a video game). This really keeps them engaged and the whole class is far more quiet than before. I have another area for partner reading and my kids with the least language go on Imagine Learning English, a computer program, for part of the time and then spend the rest of their time within the groups partner reading, getting read to. I am trying to come up with a high-frequency word center that isn’t boring and is meaningful for kids who don’t know the meaning of the words yet but preferrably would learn them and their pronunciation at this center. Any ideas? I am thinking of maybe pairing them with kids slightly above them and doing a flash card game?

*Although there is evidence of using sign language to allow babies to communicate ideas and concepts before they have the capacity for oral language, I know of no research that says using signs can be useful for ELLs – as a bridge of sorts. It’d be interesting.

I think Bloomberg should have to start giving fluent speeches in every language present in this city, so we can better evaluate his public speaking abilities and his commitment to serving ALL New Yorkers. This is what he’s asking of my students.  If he can become fluent in discussing things like budgets, homelessness, safety and security in Mandarin by June, then we can evaluate his speech writer/language teacher (not the best analogy for what he’s doing to teachers since we’re far more than speech writers).

How else do you think we can best apply his logic to his own job performance?

Today, one of my Chinese students finger-wrote his answer in the air during math and another performed the pledge of allegiance in sign language for my excited AP who right then and there took him and two others to show the principal who, I was told, was impressed. :)

One of my Bangladeshi students just “published” a biography of her grandmother during writer’s workshop. She is a beginner ELL but she puts to use whatever new words she hears, and so her English has increased quickly. In terms of writing, her strengths are in narratives, rather than in response to a reading or in any of the content areas.

Her story started with pictures – she sketched it out and drew exquisitely detailed pictures of her grandmother in her village, wearing traditional clothing, and carrying fruit on her head. She added when and where her grandmother was born, and other timeline-related details. She then asked me what the word is for a job where women carry food around. I asked if she meant in a restaurant, and she said, “No, no restaurant in her village.” I suggested food vendor but she preferred waitress. Really, we don’t have a word for such a job since it doesn’t exist exactly – another interesting relationship between language, culture, and experience.

At the heart of the story, they were taught how to focus in on their subject’s most important moment. For nearly all of my students, this moment was when their person of study hiked across the border into the US, or arrived some other way.
Alia (not her name) told me her grandmother, however, was still in Bangladesh, so I asked her to sketch some more so I could help her choose the most important moment.

It wasn’t hard to do this – rather it really took my breath away.

Alia told me her grandmother, when she was 8, had to get a job because she didn’t have the $3 it cost to go to school, plus her parents had just died. So she got a job carrying and selling food.

As she was writing, Alia came up to me, drew a picture, and asked me how to say/write it in English. To be clear, she mimed the action. The picture was of a whip.

The tree Alia’s grandmother relied on to get the fruit she sold belonged to the Rajah, or king, as she translated it, and one day he yelled at her and tied her to a tree for stealing the fruit. As king, he owned all the trees. She tried to explain she wasn’t stealing, but he demanded she move to a different village. When she refused, he made her stand so he could whip her. Then he sent boys to trash her home.

I don’t know what happens next, and it’s not even all clear to me if all this happened when her grandmother was just 8 years old, but I can really see this little girl, Alia, who just came to America a few months ago, becoming a published author here.

It’s moments like this – where I get to see them write pieces that are not simply genuine, but meaningful stories that otherwise wouldn’t get told; stories that are locked inside them, and give us a glimpse into all the experiences that have brought them this country and to this point in their lives. It’s in these stories of personal strength, where I – and maybe they – can see the uniqueness and profoundness of their lives.

These brief glimpses into their lives remind me just how upside down the world really is.