New Technology

Working with a young man from the Ukraine and I knew I would be out of town for our first meeting so I asked him if he had Skype and yes he did so I sent him a request and he accepted so last night we met even though we were in different parts of the state. It went well but it is obvious that he is more technologically inclined than I. We got things covered but we will try to meet face to face as it was very obvious that our sound was a little out of whack and in dealing with a language where grapheme phoneme relationship as far as speech is considered is very important. He picked up the sounds very well I thought but he is struggling a bit with the short /e/ and short /i/ which I really thing being in the same room with will help him and me both. My hearing and dialect will influence but if we keep going and keep working we will be fine. I learn more from my students than they can ever learn from me.

Slow but steady pays.

Been working with and intervention group and have been going over sounds and the letters that they represent with my group. Why that is what the data we have compiled on these students say they are missing. Today they were progress monitored and 3 of the 4 tested out. The one that didn't test out is from another country and is really going through an extended silent period. But if I just keep going slow and steady I may just work myself out of an intervention group and into another one that needs some academic foundations that they may have missed in the past. The hare may be faster but the slow and steady turtle won the race. Sometimes achievement comes in leaps and bound but more often than not if you just keep working with them on the needed skills to read they will get there.

The heart warming effect students have on me.

The other day we were working interventions with some of our students and my para was taking a couple at a time over to watch how the letters are formed in the mouth and lips. I was working the alphabet and the sounds that they represent with the others. I allow students to get loud and I get loud too. We have fun and we learn at the same time (at least I do). I get very animated with my good job, way to go etc. and I can't remember what I did but I was excited that one of them got the next letter in sequence and did something while I was congratulating them. One of my really reserved/quiet girls started laughing at me/or my actions and she got to laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes. Guess what, that brought tears to mine also. When parents ask me if I am ready for school to start or how my day was I often tell them great I work with angels all day long. Some think I am being sarcastic, I am not. The greatest thrill for me is to see a child smile, laugh, learn a sequence etc. Teachers really get to work with angels. We should never forget that! Even on our worst day we are someones best hope.

Lost in the translation

Tonight, I was trying to make a point about nouns and adjectives and their placement. I put up on the board the first thing that came to my mind "fast red car" and then asked a student to come to the board to write it in Portuguese. The chatter went up considerably as I was trying to figure out what the problem was. The young man went to the board and hesitantly started to translate. I was eventually found out that the phrase I had put on the board was one that my students said would not have been uttered in their language, but they did get the point. English is adjective then noun usually and in other languages it may be noun then adjective. I learn more everyday from my students regardless of their age.

Accent or just plain getting lazy

I never said I enunciated well. The other day with my vo-tech students- I used the word get only I said git (typical for me, wish I could say it was due to coarticulation) immediately my students started talking amongst themselves. I knew something wasn't right so I stopped and asked "What?" One student said we don't understand this "git". Then it hit me like ton of bricks, my enunciation was very poor on that word. They asked me if I would write it on the white board and of course I wrote "get". Then I tried to explain how I just blew it with accents and the lazy tongue etc. We all had a laugh and I tried to enunciate much more precisely after that. Spoke it all my life then I don't use the correct sounds "ain't American English grand"?

Accuracy

I had my vocational technical students/soccer players make a post on Facebook. (It is amazing how a program I thought was just a regional program is very worldwide. The world is flat.) They all have it and it is, until the change they made in format a very easy way to communicate. I am amazed at how accurate they want to be in the use of the language. I am happy they are using the language as that is the way you will learn a language. I don't want them to be just by the book English speakers I want them to be able to carry a conversation in English that will make people say- "Wow " they sure know the idiomaticity of the language. My younger students, in the school district are great kids. At this age I know that vocabulary is a big issue as many will not have the same vocabulary as many of the English speaking students do. They also do not all read well and I feel that is where the problem lies. We must teach every student to read and read well. I know that if they can read (and that involves much more than just saying the words) then we can begin to close the vocabulary gap. What say you?

New Language

For the last couple of years I have been dealing with Spanish as the primary language, that changed this year. Not really because of the schools population, although, we do get foreign exchange students every year from different countries, but because the vocational tech college brought in a soccer program this year. With that they recruited some students/athletes from Brazil. Oh alright, South America that means they speak Spanish right? Wrong! In my narrow mind and that of many others may be how we think but in South America there are many languages spoken one of which is Portuguese. Of course there are some cognates between Portuguese and Spanish but not as many as one would think. As I get older I learn so much more than when I was a young adult. Maybe it is my willingness to realize I don't have all the answers. I have had an opportunity to work with some of these soccer players and I am very impressed with their willingness to learn and to work not to mention the courage it took to travel to another country to go to school. When I was growing up if you went to another state to go to school you were really reaching out there.