Not Really Teaching English Once More

Have I ever gone through the steps that led to my teaching ELL?

Year 1

Back in August 2016, the day before school started, my principal walked into my classroom, which he rarely does, and I said, fearfully, “you’re not taking my pre-calc class, are you?” because I rarely get to teach precalc and principals only walk into your room when they’re asking for something you won’t like, and the only thing I wouldn’t like was losing my precalc class. The other upper math teachers complain, which isn’t fair, because the state tests show my kids do as well as theirs on average (their top kids do reeeeeeally well, but the rest of the kids do horribly, while my top kids do well, but everyone else does respectably.)

But no, he wasn’t taking my precalc class, he was taking my prep period. The non-tenured mostly ELL teacher who was on track to for termination in the upcoming year had taken a new job with less notice than is legally allowed. It’s not well known, but teachers aren’t allowed to quit without some degree of notice, usually between 30 and 60 days, unless the district gives permission. Otherwise, they won’t be able to teach anywhere else in the state. My principal and the English department felt the rejected teacher should be allowed to take a new job under the circumstances. English teachers hate taking extra preps, but they scrounged up two volunteers and suddenly, someone remembered I have an English credential.

So with no notice, I started ELL instruction. I had four classes planned for the following semester. But despite an ongoing hiring campaign, no one would accept the job. With a whole bunch of juggling,  Bart was handed one of my trig classes and I taught ELL the entire year. That was year one. Articles: The Things I Teach, Not Really Teaching English,ELL isn’t Language Instruction

I expected it to be an anomaly. I loved the kids, and my first, large, ELL class remains my favorite both for the students and the experience. I’m currently teaching Marshall and Kit (from the Things I Teach), both of them juniors, doing well. Juan, Anj, and Tran are all academic rock stars, with several AP classes (including English) to their credit. But the political and instructional aspects of ELL bothered me tremendously, and I was happy to be out of it.

Year 2

Then almost exactly a year ago right now, an AVP walked into my classroom just a week before the first term ended, just as I had convinced myself I was actually going to get the pay cut of a normal prep period, to ask me if I’d help them out by teaching the ELL Connections class. She didn’t say why. In fact, I’d asked the principal a month earlier to confirm that there’d be no additional class coming my way, and he assured me there were no plans to use me. Which, well, wasn’t true. He couldn’t mention that he was in the process of firing the primary ELL teacher, the 20 year expert, which he achieved in three months from start to finish, including investigation. They collapsed two of her courses into one, and gave me the other.

The second year (2017-2018) wasn’t particularly enjoyable. The kids had hated the fired teacher, and had enjoyed three months of substitutes and movies. None of them had any particular interest in learning English. I had two Chinese boys who wouldn’t (and won’t) stay off their phones, one Afghani girl who liked (and likes) to cause trouble, a German girl who was seriously pissed off at her dad for bringing her to America (I hear she’s forgiven him), a Mexican boy from my previous year who went from being the weakest student to the second strongest simply because all the others moved on, a Salvadoran girl who was friendly and helpful and hardworking unless she wasn’t, and three Guatemalans who chattered constantly in Spanish, generally refusing to even try to speak English.

Simply getting them to enjoy being a class, to tolerate each other, took a long time, although I’m pleased to say that the Disney/dead animals day was the turnaround I took it for. But as far as actual progress in learning English went, there was none. In fact, I didn’t spend much time teaching them English at all, not directly. I taught content in other areas and got them thinking and talking, which trust me was more than enough of an accomplishment. But even if I’d wanted to teach actual English, I had no curriculum.  No books. All the stuff from last year disappeared from my old room (I was using the previous teacher’s room, until the kids asked if we could just stay in mine).

One significant improvement over the year before, though, was Miko.

Miko was a science teacher with an English credential. But he loathes the new state science curriculum. So he volunteered to be the permanent replacement that I’d been temporarily, and now he’s an English teacher with a science credential. He likes running things, he likes after-school activities, teaching drama, cheerleading, stuff like that. You might have noticed that between the two of us, we could open a school. He could be in charge, even.

So after the 20 year expert got fired, Miko was put in charge, and made changes that I’d advised the year before. He reduced the infuriating “three English classes” requirement, arguing as I had (but more successfully) that just two classes would give students needed time to build credits towards graduation. He was considerably more aggressive about moving students up into second year, ending the absurd practice of forcing highly educated students who read English at a 9th grade to learn “cup”, “stand”, “pencil”, and “sit”.  And, as a guy who likes to be in charge, he took a very hands-on approach to the kids’ status, so I had someone to talk to about behavior problems and frustrations.

I apparently impressed him, too, because he asked me to teach two courses of ELL in the next year (2018-19). How to put this politely? I demurred, saying that I’d be happy to help out if another teacher quits (hahahaha! What are the odds?), but that math was my bag, thanks.

I didn’t see much need for me. The other, brand new, ELL teacher was let go. The ELL specialist (non-teacher) was leaving and we’d hired a new one. The principal decided to use experienced English teachers, non-ELL, to take over the classes rather than try to hire new teachers again.  So Miko would teach first year and Connections, Karinna, who taught AP English, would pick up second year, and Joanne, also an honors teacher, would take third year.  A full-fledged ELD department would be created, with Miko and the newly hired ELL specialist, and Karinna and Joanne in both.

So I left for summer thinking I’d be teaching two precalc classes, or even three, which I’d strongly requested, maybe a trig or algebra 2. Four blocks again, definitely–the 33% premium now for nine semesters running!–and no ELL. Alas, no history either. We’ve been hiring up in that area, so I won’t be teaching US History possibly ever again. Sad.

While I wasn’t crazy about the kids, I still felt the year finished productively, given where I started. At the time, I felt it was a good way to leave the topic.

Year 3

We teachers were notified of our schedule for the year by email, from yet another AVP, the week before school started. My note said:

• Trig
• ELL 1
• Algebra 2
• Algebra 2

WHAT THE HELL! I sent off a cranky–too cranky–note to that AVP and hurt her feelings, which wasn’t my intent and I apologized later, saying I wasn’t blaming her. I was just pissed off, having been reassured that my agitation for more pre-calc had been heard.  Why no pre-calc? Well, because one of the pre-calc classes was second block, and they needed me to teach ELL. OK, we’ll get back to that. Why no pre-calc? Well, because Chuck had though the fourth block class was mostly juniors and seniors and better suited to me than Wing, who got the pre-calc class. I gave her a look, and she thought it a good idea to give that pre-calc class to me.

Now, why was I teaching ELL again?

Well, the newly hired specialist had quit. Not quit, but gone…oh, I don’t know, fishing. I don’t remember the details. Off to another school somewhere. But we needed a specialist. So Miko stepped up. Told you, he likes to run things. He is still teaching the Connections class, and his drama class, but being specialist takes time, so he gets a block off. And so, here I am. Out of the tree, but still in the car.

I told Miko I wanted curriculum and a reasonably homogeneous class. I eventually got curriculum. I’ll discuss the class another day. But for all the frustrations, this year has been much more enjoyable. Miko is in charge, and moves over-qualified students out of my first year class at a gratifying pace. I have a curriculum with textbooks and workbooks, as well as an online program. We have an over-arching framework that allows us to focus in on kids who need a particular skill. For example, second and third year students who needed grammar focus get additional time in small group instruction, while others got practice time listening to long, involved stories and answering questions about it, just like they would in “real school”.

We’ve had several days of professional development which has been reasonably useful. And having a small department that allows us all to discuss the craziness that is ELL policy has been most cheering. I’m part of a group, one that considers me valuable as opposed to a dangerous renegade, which is a pleasant change.

Note well that the school hired two ELL teachers and fired both of them, then fired its 20 year expert, then hired and lost a specialist–all in less than two years.

I say again–hiring, not firing, is the pain point.

Here’s irony: As a math teacher, I am longest-standing ELL teacher at my school. I speak no languages other than English, yet I am the designated entry class for students who speak no English at all.

Apparently, I’m pretty good at it.

 

 

 

 

 

Great Moments in Teaching: From Dead Animals to Disney

ESL this year hasn’t been particularly enjoyable, unlike last year, which troubled me ideologically but was a joy to teach. I am primarily challenged by a hard truth: my students simply aren’t interested in learning English. In fairness, they’ve had a tough year, the details of which I won’t share. When I arrived, they weren’t grateful, but rather annoyed that they had a teacher who expected them to speak English rather than watch movies.

Most are eager to learn, having been out of regular school for a year or more. They’re just not  eager to learn English, and they particularly don’t want to speak English. I’ve been having trouble getting any conversation going; my questions are met with either utter silence or a request, in Spanish, that someone give them a one word answer to get me off their backs.

I can focus on any content, anything that sparks their interest while reading or at least hearing English.  I taught them ratios and fractions. We constructed some robots. They enjoy grammar, primarily because they just like completing worksheets instead of talking.  I showed them Zootopia, a clever little movie, and tied it into “prey” and “predators”, which then expanded into “producers”, “consumers”, and “decomposers”, then into “herbivores”, “carnivores” and “omnivores”. This went over pretty well, so I found an ESL science book and reinforced all that with pictures and text.

I’m a teacher tailor-made for covering a wide range of topics, and I’ve improved their compliance and cooperation. But they are still a sullen lot, with no cohesion and they aren’t that crazy about me, which is a hard ego hit for someone who’s quite used to being “favorite teacher”.

So I needed a day like last Friday.

Notably, Reyes was absent. “Behavior problems” and “ESL students” don’t see a lot of overlap; unhappy ESL students act out by passive inaction, in my experience. But Reyes, a junior from Mexico, became a huge behavior problem once the others started showing even minimal compliance and improvement.  He chases girls around the room. He pulls his hood over his head when he’s trying to ignore me. He constantly speaks Spanish, interrupting me and making crude comments  that cause the other Spanish speakers to giggle.  He refuses to speak English, even simply to ask to go to the bathroom. He’s not a bad kid, really, but nonetheless a disruptive force in the room was gone, and that mattered a lot.

We’d left the day before on “food web” and “food chain” and I brought the image of a spider web up again, intent on explaining in some way  that the original meaning of “web” has transformed, to start to get across the notion of metaphor. Then  I googled “web” without spider and bring up one of the results.

You get this sound, in ESL classes–at least you do in mine. It’s a genuine “Aha” of comprehension and connection. It’s a great sound.

“See? We use ‘web’ to describe the connection because it’s many connections to many other connections. It’s not one way up or down. Now look at ‘chain’” and I googled the word and tabbed to images.

Again with the “aha”.

“See the difference? In a chain, every link is directly connected to only two. See this one? In English, we often use the word ‘chain’ to mean one up and one….”

“Down!” they chorused.

“So when we talk about food web, we are talking about many to many.  See the many connections? All these animals exist in a web, with different relationships. Now look at a food chain. See the clear cycle, or circle?”

So far, so good. Then I lost them: “First, we’re going to focus on food chain, which is a basic way of seeing who is eating, and who is being eaten.”

I was quite surprised to hear a big groan from Allie. “I HATE English!!!”

Taio agreed. “Both eating! Why eaten sometimes, sometimes eat?”

Ah. “So when is it eat? When is it being eaten?”

Allie threw up her hands. “They are both the same thing!”

“No, they’re just the same verb root. But…. Huh. Let me think.”

“See? English is stupid!”

“No, no, I get that! And you’re right. English can be insane. But I’m not teaching you verbs right now. I just want to figure out how to make you see the difference. Oh, wait.”

And I quickly googled up “rabbit eating carrot“.

“The rabbit is eating the carrot. The carrot is being eaten by the rabbit.”

Pause, but I could see they were thinking. So I googled up “fox eating rabbit”.

“The fox is eating the rabbit. The rabbit is being eaten by the fox. So if you are eating, you are the one getting food.”

“If you are eaten, you are the food?”

“Exactly!”

Elian stood up and came to the front by the projector. “Who eats fox?”

“Great question. I don’t know? Who would kill and eat foxes?”

“Birds?” Allie again.

“Hey, that’s an idea.” I google “eagles eating foxes“.

“So then someone eats eagles?” Taio asked.

“Maybe. But some predators aren’t eaten. Like humans. We kill other predators, though, because of competition. So we kill foxes because foxes will eat our chickens and rabbits. Or we kill eagles because we like their feathers.” Elian nodded, and leaned against a desk, still up front.

“Let’s try another chain.” I google “mouse eating“.

“Elian, is the mouse eating or being eaten?”

“Eating!”

“Yes! So Taio, what is happening to the blackberry?”

“The blackberry is…eaten?”

“Allie?”

“The blackberry is eaten by the mouse?”

“You got it! So who eats mice?”

“SNAKES!” I had all seven kids playing along as I google snake eating mouse.

“The snake…” I prompted.

“the snake is eating the mouse!” even my non-English speakers, like Chao, was moving his lips, at least.

“THE MOUSE IS EATEN THE SNAKE!” announced Hooriyah, my lone Afghan student.

“No. Eaten BY,” from Elian.

“Yes. The BY is very important. Otherwise, in English, it sounds like you are saying ‘eating’.”

“That’s why I don’t like English. Eaten and eating sound the same!” Allie nodded.

“So remember the ‘by’. That will help.”

“Do snakes eat deer?” Taio asked.

I can’t begin to explain how pumped I was. We’d now kept steady conversation for close to ten minutes, where everyone was chiming in without prompting. So I googled “snake eating” and we paged down looking.

“THERE!” Taoi pointed.

“I have a question,” Allie announced. “What do you call that word that snakes do to….” she paused. Kept pausing and then shrugged. “I don’t know the word.”

“Crushed? Constricted? Squeezed?”

Allie had come up to join Elian, standing by the Promethean, looking at the images for one specific thing. “No. The other way. Before.”

“Poison? Some snakes bite their prey and the poison kills or at least paralyzes–makes the animal not able to move.”

“No, not that. It’s….” and here Allie gave up  in frustration, looking at me, trying to “think” the word at me.

Up to now, I’ve been doing a good job, but it was all ad hoc teaching, taking what comes.  But I don’t think all teachers grasp the essential moments of their job. This was an essential moment and I made it a great one.¹

Nothing is more important to me in that minute than identifying Allie’s word. Writing this a week later,  I have a vivid memory of standing next to the projector, looking intently at Allie, oblivious to everything else, trying to grab the word out of her brain. And best of all, I could see that she knew this. She knew I was absolutely intent on figuring out her word, that I wanted this, that I wanted to be useful because hell, she’s stuck in this class learning a language she hates, can’t the teacher give her information she actually wants? For once?

My second great moment arrived, but I’m not sure it’s a pedagogical moment or just that of a very good and quick thinker. Because instead of trying to prompt more information from her, I started thinking about snakes. What are the ur-Snake things? I’d gotten constriction, gotten poison, what other snake categories are there?

“Cobra?” Allie stared intently at the google results, but shook her head. “No, it’s…” she paused again, giving up.

“What do you call that?” Elian pointed.

“That’s a hood. Cobras have a really distinctive look. That’s why I thought maybe Allie was thinking of them.”

More ur-Snake. What else? I stare at the cobra images, and suddenly, miraculously, I think of Indian snake charmers.

“HYPNOTIZE!” I practically shouted.

“YES! WITH THE EYES!” Allie was overjoyed. “It makes the animals….something.”

“Obedient. Calm.”

“What’s hypnotize?” Hooriyah.

Third great moment, back to teaching. How to show kids what Allie is thinking of, and the meaning of “hypnotize”? I switch over to youtube.

“This is a famous Disney movie. Has anyone seen it?”

“Yes!” Allie was over the moon with excitement. “This is what I was thinking of!”

So as the scene progressed, I showed the students the broadly caricatured meaning of hypnotize.

When this was over, Allie rested content, sitting back down.

“How do snakes hypnotize?” Taio asked, saving me the trouble of raising the issue.

“I don’t think snakes actually do. I think people just think it is true.”

Allie nodded. “My neighbor has a snake. He says they don’t hypnotize.”

So I googled again, and we found a few highly verbal sites that seemed to deny it, but I didn’t dwell on this much.

Final pretty great moment in teaching: I brought it back to food chains!!

“So. Remember where this all started? Eating and…..”

“Being Eaten!”

“Let’s go through some food chains that you might see in a farm.” I wrote on the board.

corn->mouse->owl

“Owl?” asked Hooriyah, and I googled “owl eating mouse”.

“So now we know three bird predators: owl, hawk, eagle.”

Another food chain: wheat->caterpillar->black bird

“What’s wheat?” Taio again. “I don’t know wheat.”

“Every country has a primary grain. In South America, the big grain is corn. Maize.” Elian nodded. “In China, in most of Asia, it’s rice. In Europe and in America, also the Middle East, wheat is big.”

Allie, who has Brazilian parents but was born in Germany, nodded. “Yes. Bread is made from wheat.”

“And the Germans do amazing bread.”

“Bread!” Suddenly Taio is galvanized. “We have bao bread!”

I know a lot of Chinese food, but this one was new, so I googled.

“Oh, like in pork buns! I didn’t know that.”

“Dumplings. I hate dumplings,” Maria, Salvadoran, my best English speaker, had been missing from most of the class and had just arrived.

“No, this isn’t dumplings.” I corrected her. “Dumplings are like shu mei. It’s food wrapped in a pastry.” Chao sat up and chattered excitedly to Taio, who answered in English.

“Yes, that’s dumpling.”

I grinned at Elian, my only repeating student. “This feels like last year,” and he smiled in recognition. Last year, we’d talked about food in class all the time, going around the room talking about various foods just for fun–what they eat in Afghanistan for breakfast, what they eat in Vietnam for dessert, why Westerners make the best desserts (that was my claim, anyway, although my students roundly disputed this assertion).

We finished up with explanations of caterpillars and cocoons, and discussing the difference between blackbirds and crows–“One is just a black bird, the other is a blackbird.”

The bell rang off for once on an animated conversation.

I started this article a week ago, and was originally going to finish it with the hope that my class had turned the corner. My perpetual lagtime in writing allows me to say that it is better. Last week was a distinct improvement on every day that came before the great moments. More conversation, less lag time, and a much improved sense of camaraderie, even Reyes is speaking with a bit less prompting.

Before last Friday, I’d been telling myself regularly that tough classes are good for me. They keep me humble, keep me looking for answers, for methods, for strategies to help my students want to learn.

Besides, I’d tell myself grimly, tough classes make the triumphs all the sweeter.

I love being right.

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¹Again, the great moment is mine. I’m standing there going oh, my god, this is a great moment in teaching, in my life. For me! The kids, hey, if they liked it, that’s good.