Modern Day One-Room Schoolhouse

[Editor's note: Ms. Flecha is a third-year teacher in an elementary school in Queens. She blogs at My Life Untranslated.]

This is my third year as a teacher but in many ways it’s a first. It’s only my second year in the classroom and it’s my first year teaching 5th grade. In my self-contained ESL class, we’ve grown from 20 to 28 students since September — all of my new students are brand new to the country. This means I have roughly 20 beginners in a multi-lingual, multi-level class. Eleven of my students speak languages that I don’t: Indonesian, Chinese, Bangla, Urdu and Pashto. The rest are Spanish speakers. Their reading levels range from AA to Q. My colleagues tell me it’s like I have my own one-room schoolhouse. This is exactly the type of class I’ve always wanted, and yet sometimes it feels like it will be the death of me.

Using Chinese within sentence frames

At night, no matter how much I try to dream about something pleasant and relaxing, I still have sweat-inducing bad dreams about my class. Or I wake up at 2 a.m. from a vigorous planning session in my exhausted brain. Sometimes I wake with good ideas, but it would be a nice change of pace to dream about Gerard Butler instead of word walls!

With every week seeming to bring me a new student, I feel like I’ve been running just to stand still, always having to reorient and get to know another new kid. Initially, I had my students paired with someone who spoke their language if possible. I did this thinking it would encourage more English practice, and it did get some newcomers to work with or ask for help from other students. The new Chinese students, however, with their very limited English and quiet demeanors, just seemed disconnected from the class, as if they were inside a bubble that they’d breach only rarely.

One of these students, CW, is especially withdrawn. He holds back smiles, won’t look me in the eye (partly out of respect and custom), and rarely does the work the rest of the class does. He would just sit there, picking off skin from his fingers, staring off into space, or murmuring to himself. Even with the other Chinese students, he is timid and distant. I waited until late October to even approach doing a running record with him, because he just seemed too agitated whenever I’d speak to him. I’ve had promising moments with him, but they’ve been few and far between. I’m worried, but I’m trying to be patient and understanding.

Then, during last week’s spelling bee, I had the new Chinese students sit together at a table to observe those in the bee. So I could see whether they knew the names of the letters, they were to follow along, pointing at the letters and raising their hands when a student misspelled a word. I noticed that while they may not have been speaking English, there was real language learning happening; together they were discussing and working out what was going on.

After the spelling bee, I created a table of eight — the five new Chinese speakers plus three Spanish speakers — right at the front of the room. Their resources are now pooled, and I can easily see which scaffolds are working for them and which are not. I always put sentence frames on the board, but now I add Chinese as a guide. I also incorporate photocopied entries from our bilingual dictionaries as part of the word wall. They are now far more engaged, and I think, on some level, they feel like real participants in our class. I have also been trying to learn some Chinese to show them that I value their language and that it’s okay to make mistakes.

Now CW whispers answers to me and uses the bilingual dictionaries that he once ignored. I even caught him smiling in class a few times. Maybe now I’ll start to get some sleep.

Tagged: elementary school, ESL, Queens

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