An "ESL Moment"

I was nervous for my first informal observation. I was going to be observed working one on one with Jose*, a student who I have worked with before, but who has to be constantly kept busy.

A little background on the student: When Jose arrived at Liberty in May two years ago, he was put into a second grade classroom. Before his arrival to the US, he had no formal or informal education. He could not even read, write, or do math in Spanish, his native language. He went back into second grade that September and is in third grade now. However, he is still reading at an1st grade basic level and has trouble with spelling. I had been working with the words "came" and "come", "hen", "goat", and other basic words. I emphasize to him about reading carefully and looking at all the letters because he makes up words occasionally, or will swap words for ones he knows. When he is reading aloud and runs into a word he is uncertain of, he will also look at me with a big smile and hopeful eyes, hoping that I will give him the answer. As much as I would love to, giving him the answer will not solve the reading problems he will have in the future. Giving him the tools to figure out how to read and sound out words will, so I say: "The words are on the page, not on my face". "What do we do when we see a word we don't know how to say?" I ask. "We sound it out." "So let's sound it out, what does the first letter say?". I do this multiple times a page.

Back to the observation: I had pulled out a variety of things for us to work on, including spelling. I want to make spelling fun and approachable so I had a bag of refrigerator magnet letters with the letters of the words I wanted him to spell. I had him spell them on the table, then when he wanted to, put them on the magnetic dry erase board. "Write down what you spelled in your journal!" I would say after every word he successfully spelled. "Close you eyes and spell it!" I would also command. A variety of activities and flexibility are essential to working with him, and having him go from reading a story, to getting up and spelling the words with magnet letters, to sitting down to write what he wrote are ways to keep him active but to maintain an environment of intrinsic motivation. When he, or any student, feels successful at spelling words, (or anything else), they want to do more! I also used words of encouragement to keep him going, and to let him know about his successes. He was doing so much better than normal at spelling and reading. When he saw the bag of remaining letters sitting on the shelf he exclaimed "there's more?!". I affirmed this and let him spell more words, which he was so proud of! My teacher, supervisor/observer and I left him to his own devices as we talked about my lesson. Meanwhile he wrote "Jose is a winner" on the board with the refrigerator magnets. He had risked spelling it wrong  in order to show he was proud of himself! "That is an ESL moment", my supervisor said. "Those are the moments that keep you going". And it truly was. 

Success sometimes is not about the big milestones, it is about the daily, overlooked, baby steps of progress that are made. That is ESL.

*Name changed for privacy.

What ESL is and why I'm in it.

I've never seen myself as a teacher. You may think this is strange as you read this blog, because it is about my experiences student teaching. I often wondered to myself in the many education classes I had, "what on Earth am I doing!?" I don't have a dream classroom. I don't like lesson planning. I had a bad attitude towards most of the education classes (before methods), and it showed in my grades. I have no dreams to be the next teacher of the year. I came close many times to changing my major. So what is wrong with me?


The truth is, that there is nothing wrong with me. I'm just not the typical education major (and I say that with love to the wonderful fellow student teachers who are at Nyack and who are so good at what they do. Seriously. They are great people and educators. Read their lesson plans sometime!). So why am I still in education? This is a question that I have been trying to figure out for my whole college career. 


Here are a few reasons I have come up with:


1. I'm stubborn. I didn't want to be one of the people who change majors 10 times. I wanted to do my 4 years and get out. Come what may, I thought I would go straight overseas the day after graduating. ESL (English as a Second Language) is an easy way for a non-business minded person  to work internationally. I love other cultures and languages and want to live overseas. The key word is I thought, because I didn't used to want to spend time on a MA or PhD. Thanks to my newfound interests in ESL's two sisters: second language acquisition and applied linguistics, now I would love to get both!


2. When I find a challenge, I don't quit. I love challenges and ESL is full of them. My 75 hours of methods classes field experience showed me that.


3. I like jobs that have different roles. E.g. lifeguarding is a two-fold job; you are trained for more than just pulling people out of the water and yelling "waaaaalk" for 9 hours a day. First aid, CPR, and people skills are all necessary to be a successful lifeguard. Camp counseling utilizes many skills as well. In my first summer of counseling, I used my skills at canoeing and archery to teach classes, diplomacy creativity to figure out how to solve problems between campers, physical endurance to keep going, play games and hike, and my ever-growing store of patience to work with inner-city adolescents for 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. I was stretched to my limit and further. I didn't know that teaching required so many different skills, or that it would be so stretching. (Perhaps I was absent that day in education 101). 


On one of my first days of student teaching, my mentor teacher said to me "In ESL, you're not just a teacher. You become an advocate for the kids". This is especially true in the public school system, where bureaucratic decisions, power struggles, and budgets from the district level to federal level tend to ignore the reason they are there in the first place: the students. What I experienced in the first few days of student teaching gave me peace that I was in the right spot. There is plenty of challenge for me, and plenty of skills to use. An ESL teacher becomes many things, a mediator, a nutritionist, nurse, test administrator, researcher, counselor, detective, psychologist, policy-maker, schedule-writer, informer, file-manager, secretary, advisory, translator, go-to-person, and shield between the government and the individual child. These are from a discussion in which my ESL teachers were listing about our responsibilities. (And of course, when there is a medical or psychological issue, we send the student to the appropriate person.) And I think that there are many other responsibilities an ESL teacher has that I haven't even discovered yet!




My first few days of student teaching at Liberty Elementary were relieving. I have always feared being a mainstream classroom teacher, they have so many responsibilities for the same students every day all day for so many different subjects! In ESL, I see the same students all day and every day (most of the time), but there are different ages, K-5, and we see some of the more often than others. This year at Liberty, the ESL students are all pull-outs, which means that we pull them out of their classrooms to ours to focus specifically on English. We are mostly responsible for teaching the reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary and grammar of English through content. We of course also help with homework or classwork of any subject that they need help with. (In different formats of teaching English, for example a sheltered classroom, specific subject matter is taught to English Language Learners (ELLS) in their own, non mainstreamed classroom).


I could go on for much longer about the intricacies of ESL but I won't! I hope this was informing as well as fun to read, please leave any feedback or comments below! I look forward to writing more and learning more!