The Importance of Lending a Hand
Comments(1) On a Wednesday class, Chelsey introduced a teacher from Northern California (A.K.A., The Bay Area) to our classroom. My question to Chelsey is: “Where on God’s earth do you find/track down all these amazing teachers?” Anyways, let’s get back on track. This teacher has taught English to students. However, in her school the door opened up for her to teach to ESL/ELL students. Nonetheless, she did not have the ESL/ELL qualification to teach (she felt) and went back to school to be certified. She works with students who are mostly ESL/ELL students if I recalled correctly.
The climax of her presentation for me was when she spoke concerning how the school left the “disadvantaged” students behind. There was one circumstance in which a CS student was helping her do work after school but was not going to have her hours counted toward anything. The teacher questioned her as to why? She said the counsellor/teacher told her she did not meet one or more of the conditions. Nonetheless, she read the fine print/literature and realized she meet all the conditions and signed her up for the scholarship. In the end, she impacted a student. Some may argue the degree of impact that had on the student. Nonetheless, that “small” thing that the teacher did for the student may be tremendous or paved the way for this student to believe in herself and ultimately allows her dreams to come true.
The take home message here is do not always let the school system be. If you see or sense something is not right, take action. This will be difficult for newly graduated teachers to adapt. Thus, we do not want to be in trouble especially during our first year of teaching in any way. Nonetheless, if you know something is not right, change it!
I agree with you! I too resonated with her point of needing to fight for and protect the rights of ELL students. Teachers often focus too much on ELL students’ language capabilities and forget that these students also face an array of other life difficulties and challenges because of their background, and that without English language they may not be equipped to deal with. These ELL students may be living with home-stay families and apart from their parents, or have family members that are also English Language Learners. In comparison, they have much less support compared with many native English speaking students. They need people to look out for them and guide their way, or as she puts it “tread the water”, and make sure that they are not being taken advantage of or missing out on life opportunities!