Lots of emotions to process this summer. Namely, being a first year teacher in an inner-city high school.
I did a good job. Despite what the first two weeks looked like. Period 2 was my most challenging but also most rewarding, and period 3 was a piece of cake. But my period 1 class was particularly special. What an amazing group. I started the year doubtful that I could make it work. Very few students had even a basic grasp of conversational English. I was not certified to teach English as a second language. But one of my gifts is stubborn pride and another, a heavy heart, the marriage of which made this group of students and I come together and work out in the end. These kids - every one of them - learned to speak English by the year's end.
More than 50% of my students even came to learn how to write a basic paragraph with few spelling or grammatical errors. This may not sound like a huge feat for secondary levels students, but for ESL students, it was.
My coworkers and I bonded quickly. There were four of us on the ESL team, all female, and I was the only teacher with previous teaching experience, although neither of us had taught ESL. We were all wading in new waters together. We shared ideas and developed a curriculum since there was none to go on. We had no teacher leader like other departments in the building had. We had no support, and leaned on one another, often tearfully, and just had to put our best foot forward day in and day out.
My period 1 was comprised of 19 students, all of whom spoke Spanish. Whole group discussions were difficult at first, as some students could not comprehend my pace of speech. Others could, and would bore if I slowed my pace. I found differentiation to be challenging.
Most of my students were not self-directed so small groups were not containable. When I did structure small group activities, and even when they were structured well, students often resorted to socializing in Spanish. I spent most of the first academic quarter exhausting these models of instruction that typically work in mainstream Western education before my team and I discussed trying something new.
By the second quarter, two of my Period 1 students dropped out. I was heartbroken, and felt I had failed them. However, this motivated me to work longer evenings, lesson planning into the next day or two. I began chunking my 90 minute lessons into short mini-activities that fell into routines.
One of these activities was a word scramble. I projected a scrambled 7 letter word on the board and asked students to find as many English words within that scrambled word as they could in 3 minutes. Students could work alone or in pairs and turn in a sheet of paper when time was up.
I found that competition and short tasks motivated students to focus more. I also had a daily activity where students' names were written on popsicle sticks. Each student would pull a popsicle stick from a cup and announce the student's name and read a daily question posted on the board - asking that student the question. The other student would then have to answer that question, then pick a popsicle themselves and ask another student the same question. This would go on until each student had asked and answered the question of the day. It was a good conversational activity and taught students how to have conversations in English. It also gave students time to think about their answer in advance while waiting their turn to be called on, and it gave students an opportunity to get to know one another.
I allotted time for doing workbook pages, reading plays, and working on projects during my chunking of lesson plans also. But I never chunked more than 10-15 minutes for one activity. If I did, I knew students would divulge in an off-topic conversation. When students did work in groups, I came around with a red pen and grade book, and marked a check or check plus or check minus by their name depending on whether the student was on task. Doing so kept students on task. It was amazing what power that red pen and grade book had when I walked around with each in hand.
I never had to yell at my period 1 class. In my other classes I did raise my voice often. But period 1, never. One boy, Hector, would urge me to get angry sometimes because he craved order and discipline, so I would cater to his demands but the class would not take me too seriously. They knew I was too caring to get angry. But one day during the second quarter I did yell at the class in Spanish (I minored in Spanish in college and my students did not know I spoke the language at all until this very day). Hector got very excited. He clapped his hands uncontrollably and said "yeah, yeah!" when I got going on my angry Spanish teacher rant. My anger was being encouraged and reinforced by other students as well! They joined in and yelled at each other in Spanish. Finally the room grew gloriously silent. The rest of the year I had a newfound respect from this class I never dreamed possible. Students included me in handshakes at the door and other greetings. I think some even bowed at me when entering the classroom, unless I am imagining this, but I think not.
I dabbled in future Spanglish rhetoric when I became frustruated with students using cell phones. It was a recurring battle teachers had. "Diablo!" I once said. "Porque you have telefono and you know tienes free time later! Despues! Put it away! I don't want to see it! I will call su mama! You will fail este clase! Try taking this class again este verano. Verano clase! Comprendes? Ay, coño."
A student SnapChatted my humorous outburst this particular day with their phone without me knowing and throughout the rest of the day several other high school students I didn't even teach were high five'ing me in the hallways and telling me, "You tell 'em Miss, You call they mama."
Ninety minutes is a long time to spend conversing with a roomful of people who do not speak the same language as yourself. That was my true challenge of the year. Teaching was secondary to that. Classroom management, third.
During the third quarter, on a cold winter day, a new student arrived to my class. He was tall and thin and took a seat in the front center aisle chair. He sat perfectly erect, eager to learn. He was Iraqi. His family had fled the war, and come to Providence, RI, and he probably had high expectations of an American classroom. I worried when I learned he spoke Arabic. Everybody else spoke Spanish. I worried about whether my Period 1 students would accept him into this tight, close, dysfunctional family we had established over the previous 4 months.
On the very next day, I translated the popsicle stick question into not just Spanish, but Arabic also. I asked my Iraqi student to read the question to the class in his language. The Hispanic students were fascinated with seeing the Arabic script on my PowerPoint board, hearing him speak the language, and learning the notion of reading backwards.
On the third day of the Iraqi student's attendance, my students started to ask him to write their names in Arabic. We ended up making a poster for the classroom with each student's name written in Arabic.
The Iraqi boy was quickly embraced by my Period 1 class. It made me feel very warm and fuzzy inside, like somehow I had some part in creating a classroom environment receptive to being friendly and inclusive.
Once a week I would hand out a twenty dollar bill to an exceptional student - someone who was still paying attention when the rest of the class had lost interest in my lesson. This was my selfless gift, and act of giving back to my students for the many gifts they gave me each day I had the joy of teaching them.
I also asked trivia questions as part of my lesson planning. They would be interesting questions, and sometimes I'd give a prize like a free homework pass or bonus points on an upcoming test or quiz. But on one very special day I asked, "How many words do you think are in the English language" and to the person whose guess was closest to the correct answer, I gave $20. When we guessed at how many English words there were, they all got a little side-lesson in saying their numbers, too. I turned the trivia question into a lesson on numbers vocabulary. We differentiated the phonics in saying the "th" sound in "thousand vs the "the" sound in "there," for example. The "th" sound makes 2 different sounds and students didn't know that before.
"Stick your tongue in your teeth like this and blow. (I made th sound)."
"Notice the difference between the 'th' sound in the words thick and thin with this and that."
"Say it. Thick Thin. This That. Stick your tongue out. Not your whole tongue. Anthony that's inappropriate. Nope try again." We had fun sticking out our tongues and practicing our sounds.
Our daily lessons tended to be spontaneous like this. I had a word of the day everyday to practice pronouncing. We clapped out the syllables. We practiced spelling it and saying the letters. We acted out the word, used the word in a sentence, drew a picture of the word when possible... and then sometimes if the word had a blended sound in it, such as "sm" or "pr" I'd tell the class to fill the board with other words with the same two letters together in them. Students came up to the board, alone or in pairs and grabbed a marker and got busy. They earned participation credit this way which was 20% of their report card grade.
Kids grabbed dictionaries and explored posters in the room for words to shout out. There were never any prizes for this activity, but I motivated them. I would tell them, "Once this board is full of words, I'll give you 5 minutes of free time." They would go nuts shouting out words for me to write on that board. And it always killed a good 15 minutes or so of class.
Sometimes I gave out raffle tickets which could be turned in for points on exams. Raffle tickets could be earned spontaneously through good behavior, answering a trivia question correctly, being the first person to arrive at class, and so on.
Period 1 gave me memories I will surely take to the grave. One student in that class, a girl, I came to call mi hija, which means my daughter. I came to love her as if she were my own. At the end of the school year, not knowing if I'd be back to see her again, I prepared a message and told her this:
"Tu eres mi hermosa hija, aunque no te tube en la barriga pero si e tengo en el corazon."
Translated, it means you are my daughter not grown in my belly but in my heart.
