This week I will mostly be talking about my observations at Bloomington Junior High School with Kathy (my cooperating teacher). BJHS's ESL program is pretty small; there are only 6 in her class and the rest have been mainstreamed into regular classes. The class I observe is a combination Social Studies/Reading ESL class and lasts for an hour and a half which is a very long time for these students in my opinion. But then again, Kathy says that the kids really love being in ESL class because everything is a little slowed down for them, and she works with them very closely on the material. Their textbooks are at a 3rd and 4th grade reading level so that they can fully comprehend the material, but even then some have some difficulty. The class make-up is 5 students who are Spanish speakers and 1 students whose first language is Hindi. I sort of feel bad because he ends up getting a little lost in the shuffle because all the other students speak the same language, but they are very nice to him and are able to talk to him in English most of the time. One girl has just moved here from Honduras (in January) and has been living with her aunt ever since; her mother just arrived yesterday and even from Tuesday to Thursday I saw a huge difference in her personality. When I first met her, she was very shy and did not even want to talk to me in Spanish but today she was quite talkative and wanted to participate more, and came in with a smile on her face which elated Kathy. Hopefully her mother being here will really help her be motivated in class.
Two of the students in the class are very advanced in English; they are both A students and Kathy lamented that they were still in ESL but unfortunately they passed every section of their ACCESS exam other than the English section which still placed them in ESL. They will be taking it again at the end of the school year and hopefully they will pass then because then they will end up in the ESL program at Bloomington High School, which she does not want for them. I did not ask her much about the program there, but I will find out more details as I go along. Kathy is an excellent teacher; she actually taught at the ELI for 9 years before she went to the junior high level, so she has a lot of experience with ESL students. She is really compassionate and helpful, but she gets frustrated a little easily with the students at times. She said she feels bad for getting irate with them, but she does not speak much Spanish so she never really knows if they are staying on task with the lesson, and that would be frustrating to a lot of people.
Thankfully for me, I do not need to worry much about the language barrier with Spanish and I was able to help the two girls who have been here for a short period of time with their assignments. I am really excited that I can get some translating experience along with the practicum experience because I always need to speak more Spanish! I actually helped one of the girls with her exam today; she did pretty good for the most part but needed a few words and phrases explained to her in Spanish, so I felt really good about helping her out. She seemed a little awkward with me, which I understand completely because this was only my second day in the class. Hopefully that will get better as we go along. The other students are very welcoming and really willing to talk to me and listen to me, since Kathy wanted them to believe I have some authority in the classroom, so I will need to work on that.
I wanted to tell an interesting story I heard at Heartland today: one of the women in our class (she is from Ecuador) has been here for a few years. Somehow one of their error correction activities got them on the topic of passports and green cards, and the woman told us something disturbing that happened to her here in Bloomington-Normal. She said one night during her first week here, she was walking down Main Street to go to Walgreen's, and a cop stopped her on her way there. He promptly asked her if she had a green card and passport with her, and she said of course she did, so she handed them over. He checked them and asked her a couple of questions about why she walking and why she was out so late, etc which she answered politely. She said he seemed skeptical but left. She said a similar thing happened to her a few months ago, but not with the same cop. Sue and I were pretty appalled by her story. The woman seemed fine about it, even laughing, but Sue explained to her that what they did was wrong and is illegal and the woman was very surprised. I just find it very irritating that just because they see an ethnic woman walking down the street, they immediately think she is up to no good. It's just so racist! These people come here and expect to be treated the way they should be treated, and stopping her on the street for basically no reason is completely disrespectful.
I thought that it went along nicely with what we were talking about in class and in the Made in America chapter. We put people into these racial categories and associate the stereotypes we see in movies or on television and we then assume that all people of that background are like that, which I have learned over time is definitely not the case.
No comments:
Post a Comment