Author: pwang7

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!

In a nutshell, vocabulary is a fundamental part of reading comprehension. In other words, if you don’t know enough words, you are going to have trouble grasping what you read. On one hand, a few words you don’t know will not interfere with your comprehension significantly. However, if there are too many words you don’t know, comprehension will suffer. The sole purpose of reading is comprehending the content of the books or textbooks, therefore, too many not understood words will cause the reader to not comprehend the content.

Students with strong vocabularies are more successful in school than students with weak vocabularies. It is not wrong to say that people with strong vocabularies will be more likely to enjoy successful careers. This is true because words are in fact the tools not just of better reading, but of better writing, speaking, listening, and even thinking as well. The more words you have in your toolbox, the more effective  and even persuasive your communication/message can be.

In today’s society, a strong vocabulary is more crucial than ever before. This is so because there are fewer less people working in farms and factories. Thus, there are far more jobs that provide services and/or process information than in the past. More than anything else, words are tools of our trade: words we use in reading writing, speaking and listening. Furthermore, it not uncommon for people to change jobs and be promoted and learning new skills at an ever-increasing pace. Therefore, the key to success in this case will be the abilities to communicate effectively and learn quickly. In brief,  a strong vocabulary is mandatory for both of these skills.