“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.
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