April 27th to May 1st
After saying good-byes on Friday (April 24th), it was a little strange coming back to RSS on Monday morning, especially since none of my peers would be there. Some teachers I met in the staff room early in the morning were pleasantly surprised and asked me why I was still there and not in Switzerland, while others sympathized with me on my passport situation! It felt natural being back at the school and hearing about everyone’s weekends. Before the start of classes, I met with CW at LSS and she graciously welcomed me to work with her for as long as I needed to. In addition to being a resource teacher, CW is also an English Language Learners (ELL) teacher. She teaches an ELL level one class everyday, and an ELL level two class every other day. At all other times, she is responsible for groups of students who need help and have LSS blocks assigned to them due to various learning challenges.
The ELL level two class had three students from my previous Chemistry 11 class, and it was nice to reconnect with them in a different context. This class was working on an activity they had begun in a previous class and were divided into 3 groups of 4 or 5 students. I had the opportunity to walk around and involve myself in the conversations they were having, and they had the chance to ask me for clarification on vocabulary or how to better express what they were trying to say. On my second day with this class, they were beginning to make a presentation in their groups and it was nice to be able to listen to their ideas and watch them search for and compile information on a topic they were passionate about. I was also able to guide them to more reliable and relevant information.
With the ELL level one class, CW was working on having them learn and improve their reading comprehension and sentence structure. It was interesting for me to see the students interact with each other despite the language barriers. Some of them would eventually resort to talking in Mandarin to their neighbors, but CW was consistently clear in her expectation of having only English spoken during class time. Since I saw this class everyday and could get to know the energy and dynamics of the classroom a little better, I was also able to give CW some input when she decided to make a new seating plan.
With both the ELL classes, I was able to observe different styles of teaching, different activities, and a different way of interaction with students than what I was used to or what I had observed with my Chemistry and Science classes in the long practicum. It was a new and valuable learning experience for me, in that it was a completely different demographic than the one I had just spent the last 3 months working with, and these were kids with special needs. I was able to take away ideas for smoother classroom management – like writing the agenda for the lesson on the board in chronological order with approximate amounts of time for each activity; engaging activities for serious topics – like using a set of cards with “needs” and “wants” to introduce children’s rights; slowing down, directly addressing the class, and repeating or rephrasing instructions to ensure everybody is clear. This experience allowed to me to better understand the kind of scaffolding ELL students need, and got me thinking of ways I could help my students not only learn and understand better, but also be more comfortable and confident in their use of the English language.
The LSS supports students with learning challenges as well as physical disabilities. I met a lot of students with IEP’s (Individual Education Plans) that I had not had a chance to work with during my long practicum. CW shared with me some IEP’s of students she was responsible for, and also involved me in the writing of a new one for a student who had just had his psychological assessment done. Since I have not yet gone through the course on teaching children with exceptionalities and special needs at UBC, this was an amazing opportunity for me to learn how IEPs are formulated and written, and what the most important components of the IEP were. We also discussed how we could make the IEP more classroom teacher-friendly while retaining the most essential information about the student.
Coming from a science background, I spent most of my days at LSS helping students with their Math and Science. I met a grade 8 student who needed longer processing time and got frequent headaches due to a concussion he had had from a sports injury, an 18 year old girl who was learning at a grade 8 level because she had severe learning and speaking disabilities, a grade 11 boy who was having difficulty processing long and heavily worded questions, as well as a few students from my Science 9 and 10 classes from the long practicum. I was also around (but not directly involved in the care/learning of) some students who had severe physical disabilities in addition to their learning challenges, as well as a very sweet boy who was on the autism spectrum. Being at the LSS was a very different experience from being in a “normal” classroom, and it was a very rewarding and positive experience at that. I was able to give these students the individualized attention they really needed and appreciated. I also got to teach Math at the grade 8 (Volumes of cylinders and prisms), 9 (Circles and chords), 10 (Trigonometry) and 11 (Geometric sequences) levels, which I had not looked at in a while.
Overall, this week was very refreshing, very rewarding and a huge learning opportunity for me. I did not resent not being in Switzerland for even a moment because I got to meet not only the new students I was working individually with at the LSS, but also those from the seven different sets of classes I had taught during the long practicum. My lunch breaks everyday in the week were spent catching up with and talking to my students. This extra week at my practicum school gave me the opportunity to solidify my connections with these students, to walk down those corridors again, and to say hello to all the students, staff, and faculty of Richmond Secondary; it allowed me a few more days to postpone saying good-bye. My passport arrived on the Wednesday, but I continued at LSS for one more day, and flew out on Friday.
See more in Week 2…