SERVICE LEARNING

Well since I haven’t had the chance to fully talk about my experience I decided ill just post a little something about. Since we have gotten started I have gone twice honestly I was placed somewhere I really didn’t want to go, but really didn’t think it was extremely necessary to be asked to be replaced somewhere else. I thought hey teachers don’t get to choose what students they want to have in their classrooms so w.e. The first day I went I felt a little awkward the secretary didn’t seem to care that I walked in if I wouldn’t have asked them a question I don’t think they would have even noticed I walked in so that was weird. When I got to the class room I was a assigned I just walked in and introduced myself to the teachers there were 3 of them for about 17 3rd grade ESL students. I was then assigned to work with this one boy who not long ago had come from Bolivia and didn’t speak any English. At first everyone was working on vocab words and he just sat there, mind you the words were written on the board only in English this child sat there playing with his pencil without any care to what everyone else was doing. I asked him to write the words and when he did I asked him to try and pronounce them he wasn’t able to so I read the words and told him to repeat them after me this he did well. I then asked him if any of these words sounded like a word in Spanish and he said no. Most of them did tho, I was become frustrated because I thought he wasn’t trying but then I told him which words sounded alike and he agreed but then another problem arose in Spanish these words meant a couple of different things so I asked the teacher if it was all right for me to draw pictures on index cards for him and she said yes and that it was a real good idea. Then we did some math and he was also behind, but he said he liked doing math. One thing I found strange about this class was a good and full of these students were capable of being in regular but I guess there parents also want them to learn Spanish so they were also in this class. This I believe is stupid because some know both languages and others only know Spanish and the text books are completely in English no translations at all. So I though t to myself these children are going to learn English the hard way or not at all, which I don’t think is fair. Ookkk that’s enough just wanted to say a few words about it maybe I’ll share some more Thursday.