This will be my final observation blog post for the semester, and in this post I'm going to talk about some observations and basically just sum up my experience and how much I have seen the students progress since I began my journey in practicum.
The morning class started off a little slow because they had to ask her a lot of individual questions about their exam that they took last Thursday so they did not really start class until about 8:30. However, I had the pleasant experience of listening to them talk about their own homelands and what they thought the difference between the United States and their countries were specifically. What sparked the discussion was that one of the students was wondering why everyone in the United States thought it was the best country in the world even though it has negatives, and Sue posed the question to the entire class to answer. Some did choose to sit back and listen quietly to the discussion but some were extremely involved in what Sue was saying. She talked a little about her own views on politics in the country and that they for her were a negative but she asked them what they thought was positive and what was negative. One of the students mentioned that we are very individualistic here in the US which I can totally agree with; they said that they felt like the news was only local and we did not get much national news like they do in other countries. I felt the same way when I was in Spain. I was amazed that they had so much to talk about in Spain as well as Europe, whereas we in the US only get news about our own specific county, not even the entire state at times. It does show that we do not care about anyone outside even our own city let alone other states.
Another student mentioned that she did not understand why Americans were always in a rush and why they never seemed to relax. She said she has grown accustomed to that kind of lifestyle having lived here for 6 years, but she said it was really confusing to her at first about why everyone was constantly stressed out about work and school, but now she definitely understands what American culture is like and she has mostly assimilated to it. I agreed with this as well; Americans are generally stressed out all the time because our system of employment is very different than that of other countries, but one student said that she liked our employment system because in her country she did not get paid every 2 weeks like clockwork like we do here. She was a pharmacist and did not even make enough money to support herself, let alone her husband and children. It boggles my mind because I could not imagine that someone who has a high-paying job like that would not be able to afford to support their family. It is definitely eye-opening.
The same student (the pharmacist) talked at length about her own experiences in the Congo and what she loved most about the US was the freedom and safety that she feels here. She feels like her children are always safe and even though she works in housekeeping and her husband does as well, they make way more money than they did in the Congo and they are very happy with that circumstance. She is studying to get her pharmacy licensure here in the US because it does not transfer over to our system, which I think is ridiculous. Education is so sparse in those countries and she does not even get to use what she worked so hard for. It makes me angry and just so sad for her. I wish rules were different.
For the classes I observed at Heartland, mostly what I saw the biggest difference in was their perception of errors in their daily activities, like the editor-in-chief, syllabus stress and TOEFL-style sentences where they had to correct and find errors, was that they were much, much quicker in finding which ones were the errors with the most accuracy and then being able to fix them without too much thought. This was quite different from when I began observing and they did not always get the answers right and had to really work it out in their head before they answered. Now they feel so much more comfortable talking in front of their peers in error correction and in discussion. As the semester went on, they went much more in-depth than I ever would have imagined. They are able to speak in paragraph discourse and in the past which I cannot even do in Spanish very well! I was so impressed with how long they could go on speaking and be understood by their audience, not to just to sympathetic listeners like me and Sue. I was so proud to see them progress since I have made connections and gotten to know the students. I was definitely sad to leave them!
At Bloomington Junior High, the progress that I observed was a little less obvious only because I spent less time at the school and less extended one-on-one time with each student as I did at Heartland. However, I noticed that the students over the course of the semester felt really comfortable speaking to me more instead of only talking to Kathy. Both of the girls were much more willing to participate in the class discussion even if they did not have to speak. They wanted to help out the teacher a lot and were very respectful of her and of me as a translator/observer. The students seemed very comfortable with me being there and even expressed some sadness that I was leaving. I figured they would not because they are junior high boys; I do not expect displays of emotion, but they let out a sound of disappointment when I told them it was my last day, which I was happy to hear that I had made an impact. The students seemed a lot quicker in answering questions from the discussion and did not have to think as much when they spoke; I mostly paid attention to the less advanced speakers. One of the boys has grown so much in his speaking abilities and his comfortability factor with the other boys in the class; they actually talk to him and include him in their conversation now even though he is from a different culture and speaks a different language than them. I am glad to see that they are no longer segregating as much as they had been before, and that they wanted to help their peers. They seemed to learn more about the Constitution and even though they joked about certain stuff (they are boys after all), they seemed to really know what was going on and were able to get engaged in discussion without much prodding from the teacher. I wish I could have stayed around longer to see how they did on their test, but I will keep in touch with Kathy and find out!
