From Aria by Richard Rodriguez and from Teaching Multilingual Children by Collier

                                                             
“When does twenty-first century technological society have to be so complicated, educational politics so confused, education so bureaucratized and standardized? How do we prepare students to face this complicated world we have created and yet allow them to retain their love of learning?”

Collier poses these questions early on in her text. As teachers we can all ponder over the answers and most likely we all have a good idea why these questions need to be posed. We can go back to our very first class when we learned about SCWAMP.  It is the world of privilege and power. Collier does not have a direct answer for these questions but she certainly understands the challenges we teachers face daily. Although many of us do not have ESL students, we do understand the difficulty in teaching our students who do understand the English language. How do we allow our students to retain their love of learning? Wow! When we teachers have lost our love for teaching, our students will certainly lose their love for learning. We need to realize that in the classroom we have the opportunity to put aside the bureaucracy and the politics and do what we do best; inspire, education, and prepare.

Collier discusses certain guidelines for teaching English to second-language learners. In one of the guidelines he states “Teachers should be aware of the special kind of speech that mothers and fathers use automatically with their children, and try to emulate this.”

This connects to Lisa Delpit when she discusses how to teach with “cultural diversity” in mind. This is especially important when teaching second language learners. Rodriquez’ family changed their language, although it would have been a better choice (in my opinion) to have a teacher who embraced their culture and thier words.

I guess we can say this is a “significance “problem; significant to the classroom teacher, significant to the student, and significant to the bureaucrats.  After all, these ESL students certain bring down our standardized test scores.  Wesch states, “If our students are not “cut out for school,” perhaps we have made the mold too narrow or inflexible, or more likely, just not meaningful enough to inspire a student to fit in. That’s the significance problem”(5).

As teachers we need to make sure that all students are getting the education they deserve. Many ESL students are labeled as not performing well because of the language barrier, when in fact many of these students are very intelligent. We have been learning a lot about “Cultural knowledge” and how important it is in teaching. Cultural knowledge is such an important aspect to teaching.

 In a article I read from the LA department of Education, mentions the importance of understanding that students who use English as a second language are not dumb. Howver, many school districts refuse to put these kids in higher level classes even when they reach fluency in English.

“Martinez immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the sixth grade, and remained in the English learner program until the ninth grade. Even after his transition into the mainstream curriculum, he was not placed into college-preparatory classes besides Algebra. Martinez proposed translating material from college-preparatory classes into the students’ native languages, so as not to “neglect the whole student” in pursuit of English language mastery.He also stressed the importance of parent involvement in order to reinforce language acquisition out of the classroom. “

Read the whole article here.

http://www.neontommy.com/news/2011/10/department-education-la-school-district-failing-english-learners

I wonder if ESL kids feel like Peppermint Paddy when she is in school?