Constructing Kasun, Educator

“Ok, stop, I can’t do this,” is how a student responded to me last week.

Was I ordering him to read War and Peace?  Demanding that he write a lengthy essay?  Getting him to recite a monologue?

I was asking him to spell the word, “pet.”  This is a student who has been in the US for two and half years, who has almost entirely lost the accent on his spoken English, who has what is the approximation of third grade reading skills according to the test I applied earlier this year.  And he can’t spell three letter words from a word-study spelling battery.

It’s no wonder, then, he would act out in school.  I understand the ESOL team doesn’t want him back in their classes at that middle school (this is hearsay, in their defense).  But I probably wouldn’t either.  His oral and listening skills would be much more advanced than his peers, but his reading and writing scores have continued to keep him down.  And, frankly, he hardly knows how to read, despite his reading score.

 But he likes poetry.  He likes getting a friend’s sister to write poetry with his friend.  And I showed him a short, simple poem in Spanish I had put on a small website I’m creating (slowly) with my students, and he was thrilled to read the poem and understand it in Spanish.

So I sort through this mystery of, “Stop it–I can’t take any more!” and try to read up on how to teach letter sound awareness so this student can begin to succeed in academics and maybe, hopefully, stop acting out in class and in society once he tastes a little bit of the sweetness of academic success.

I’ve officially begun working in the longterm with students. 

 I like it.  It’s fun.  And scary.  And requires a lot of individualized planning and weighs you down because you know that you want each lesson to be a hit for each student since you work alone with them.

 And I don’t know how much to share with you, dear reader.

The work is so personal with each student.  On one of my questionnaires for students to fill out, they get to write down what they want to learn.  One student wrote that he wanted to learn about why he is here–what his purpose is in life.  Another student began writing about God and feeling that he doesn’t feel his presence but wants to believe.  Of course there are others who are quite interested in hairstyles and makeup, but things are so personal (like what I shared in my previous post about “Daniel”) that I don’t know what to share and what not to.

If you were being instructed one-on-one, would you want to be the subject of someone’s blog post?  My inclination, when I try to answer that question honestly, is no.

And at this point in my job, I’m not sure how much I can share otherwise.  Most of my mental energy goes toward finding the right book, the right album, the right thought, to share with each unique student. 

I am, however, having thoughts about the larger implications these students have about humanity–like, for instance, that these kids are so good when I teach them (yet, supposedly, so bad according to the way our system has judged them).  And they are so good, and I’m convinced that we’re all somehow good the more I work with them.  Maybe that will change.

Or maybe it will just be the next subject of my next blog post.  To share or not to share?  I’ll have to decide.