I recoil as I write this post. What if someone from my district is watching? What if they catch on to what I’m going to write? It’s so contrary to No Child Left Behind, to standardized curricula, to everything education is mandated to be in this country these days. But I’ll share the little secret with you, anyway. The questions it presents are so big to me that I think any audience out there needs to hear them as well.
I can teach anything. I will have each student for one hour a week, and I’m supposed to teach them what they need. In this job switch, I am the ESOL teacher who will help the ESOL student learn English. However, because best ESOL practices mean teaching through content (not just skills and drills of the English language), I can teach whatever I think the student needs. So I don’t have to worry about their standardized tests that they might fail and then might make their school and our district “look bad.” I don’t have to worry about meeting all the various and wacky criteria of someone’s idea of what the study of X curriculum needs to be. Sometimes their regular teachers at their site (math, science, social studies, and English) might weigh in and ask for support in some area, “Hey, can you help Ahmed figure out how to construct a scientific question?” might be something I’ll be asked to do. But, beyond that kind of question from teachers, I’m on my own.
I have a little space in an office I share with three other women. Picture an old US 1950s schoolhouse, complete with cream colored cinder blocks and bad flourescent lighting that was “renovated” into an office space (that means they tore out a few wallks here and there and installed tampon dispensers in the bathrooms with impossibly low toilet seats and really low wash basins). So my desk faces the window with the large metal blinds and the parking lot where afternoon sun glares back at me from the cars’ sideview mirrors (hey–I’m not complaining, my district had me in windowless classrooms previously). And behind my desk is a very large closet (think C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe). In that closet are the keys to part of the kingdom. Books and books and books. Primary sources, novels, teacher guides, books on good instruction, textbooks, basal readers (argh to the last two). I can almost feeling the dragon’s breath on my neck as I face the opposite direction and prepare my work from my desk. Inside that closet are many of the tools I’ll use to access these students, to somehow enhance their lives.
But will I enhance their lives? That’s the big question. Will I provide anything of value? Will I make them love education? Is that my job? Am I supposed to get them to be compliant, to slough off their “deviant” behaviors? Or am I just supposed to somehow accompany them on their journeys, affirm them in their existence, let them know it’s ok to just be? Will I teach them about the U.S.’s “Westward Expansion” (that is part of the curriculum in my state and many others), or will it be types of clouds? Or will we do identity work through writing, and what might I encounter? Am I strong enough to be present for that tiny amount of time each week with each child?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’m hoping that somehow, some way, I can really do this.
Entries (RSS)