I think I may have been the last person in the world to watch the viral YouTube video of matt dancing but I loved it instantly.  If you are one of the 13 people in existence who hasn’t yet seen it, it’s a four and half minute video of a guy (Matt!) doing his silly dance in various locations around the world.  Sometimes he’s solo and sometimes he’s joined by enthusiastic locals who want in on the fun.

Apart from being the kind of thing that makes everyone smile, it’s great to watch while learning present progressive verbs.  I usually show the movie all the way through once and then show it a second time, pausing to get responses from the students.  Some students will even ask to see it a third time as they seem to love it as much as I do.

I attended Day 2 of the Systematic ELD workshop today.  Once again, not much in the way of new information but lots of great conversations with colleagues.

One thing that interested me was the use of ESL specific board games for reinforcing new language concepts.  I use a lot of games in my class including hangman and bingo, but I haven’t really gotten in to making boards games.  Maybe I’m lazy and maybe I’m just a by intimidated by the thought of trying to explain rules to beginners and the chaos that’s bound to ensue, but after hearing how others use board games, I think I will try a few out.

My colleague Katie recommended Lanternfish to me and there are quite a few games which look useful even at the beginning level.  In looking around I also found some promising free resources at ESL-Galaxy.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with board games in the classroom.  Are there other great resources I should know about? Feel free to leave a comment.

Today I attended the first of three all day Systematic ELD trainings mandated by the school district that provides the bulk of my program’s funding.  It was an interesting group of teachers from a variety of alternative programs in the Portland area.

I had hoped for an opportunity to immerse myself fully in discussion about best practices based on the latest research in language acquisition but in reality, I heard nothing new today.  I did already know that socioeconomic conditions and prior education impact a student’s second language learning.  I did know that having students use language in a meaningful way helps them retain that language.  And I even knew that  taking a systematic approach to curriculum design and lesson planning allows students to fill in  gaps as they move through an ELD program.  No news there, sorry to say.  I guess what really surprised me was that some private publisher appears to be raking in taxpayer money  ($150 for a binder!)  selling the kind of information that just seems like good, common sense teaching to an experienced teacher.

What I did come to appreciate after listening to other teachers is what a great job we do in our program. While many secondary ELLs are lucky to get 30 minutes of language instruction daily, we provide 12 hours/week.  Teachers in other programs work with wide varieties of skills and abilities but in out program students place into one of five levels and receive instruction tailored to their specific needs.  Because we focus almost entirely on English Language Development (bringing in content to support language development) our students learn at a very impressive rate.

This has nothing to do with my ESL teaching but I’m also a mother to three kids. My two teenage boys have been struggling with math of late and we recently discovered the Khan Academy which is a comprehensive free resource for accessible tutorials in math, science, economics and more.

Salman Khan (not the Bollywood megastar with the same name, by the way) has degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and business and has pretty much put all his knowledge in a wide range of areas out there for the world to use. It’s a huge and very admirable achievement and the site is getting lots of attention lately for good reason.  I loved reading about why Mr Khan chooses to make this fantstic resource available free to anyone with internet access.

I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world. Sounds a lot better than starting a business that educates some subset of the developed world that can pay $19.95/month and eventually selling it to some text book company or something. I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need?

Now if only the Khan Academy would address ESL!

This article about Louisville’s CARE for Kids program made my day.  I am always happy to see teachers and students being treated as people and value placed interaction  and engagement in educational settings.  I hope this gets a lot of attention and validation and that schools adjust accordingly, even (especially) if it takes away from test prep.  Because I can’t think of a standardized test that makes students feel more secure or builds community.  Just saying……

This article from our local weekly about how changes in the state’s largest school district ESL program have affected one young man was of particular interest to me as I have done volunteer work at Kateri Park.

After a 2008 audit found Portland Public Schools in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for both failing to provide students with “meaningful” access to grade level core courses and for failing to provide parents with information in their first languages.  So efforts have been made to shifts ELLs from special classes to mainstream classes even when their English skills aren’t sufficient.

Despite good intentions, the shift doesn’t represent a marked improvement, some teachers say. Now instead of getting special instruction that didn’t let students earn enough credits to get their diplomas, immigrant students are in credit-bearing core classes—but barely passing, if at all.

After writing this I discovered another article on the same topic in another small Portland paper.  It’s actually the more detailed of the two and, again, it focuses on how recent changes affect Somali and Somali Bantu students.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times reports that many US born students who started in English language learning classes in the primary grades in Los Angeles Unified School District  are still in the specialized programs when starting high school, clearly raising a lot of questions.

Researchers found that the earlier students move into mainstream classes the likelier they are to stay in school and graduate than those who don’t which makes the following speculation very disturbing:

Though the study didn’t determine why students were staying in English language programs for so long, researchers say schools may avoid moving English learners into mainstream classes to keep test scores high.

I’d love to hear what ESL teachers in the LAUSD have to say about this.

I read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities as a beginning teacher in the early 1990’s after studying to become and ESL teacher.  I’d read a lot about education at that point, but this was the first thing that made me cry.  Since then I’ve read everything he’s written and I even had the privilege of hearing him speak here in Portland a few years ago.  He writes so compellingly about things that really matter in our educational system but we haven’t seen the kind of progress needed yet.   Some things haven’t changed much since he began writing about educational inequality decades ago.  He spoke recently at Rhode Island College and offered up the following shameful facts:

The average black or Hispanic twelfth-grade student reads at a typical white seventh-grader’s level. Drop-out rates of black and Hispanic students have worsened since the 1980s. Schools in the Bronx, N.Y., have 32 students in a classroom. New York white suburbs cap their quota at 18 children per class.

Sobering statistics, to be sure.  A summary of his talk can be found here.

Police officers in Dallas, Texas have improperly cited drivers for not being able to speak English 38 times in the past three years according to Police Chief David Kunkle.

I only recently heard about The Class (originally released in French as Entre les Murs n 2008).   I pulled this DVD from the Netflix wrapper and popped it into my DVD player expecting a typical, uplifting teacher-as-hero story along the lines of Stand and Deliver and was pleasantly surprised by something far more nuanced and intriguing.

Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays the role of François Marin, a teacher in a racially diverse classroom in a Paris suburb.  The challenges are enormous, from students who have a poor grasp of French to rivalries between different student groups.  A few of his students appear excited about learning but most are indifferent at best if not flat out insolent.  We spend most of the movie in his tiny, claustrophobic classroom with occasional scenes taking place in the teachers’ lounge, meeting rooms, and in a small outdoor courtyard.

Teacher Marin comes off  as alternately stoic and frustrated, both full of high aspirations for his students and just trying to get through the day–an attitude reflected by most of the staff at the school as we peek in on faculty meetings and conversations.  While I have been blessed to generally have far more motivated and well mannered students, I was rather taken aback at times by Marin’s attitude towards his students, his occasional lack of sensitivity and, quite frankly, his poor classroom management skills. If I were the teacher, there would have been intervention much earlier in the year with some of the kids.  But then again, this is a film so maybe giving the students more room to act out made for a better a story.  In any case, Marin comes across as entirely believable in his unevenness in handling the class from one day to the next.

The film feels like  a documentary, complete with hand-held cameras, uneven timing, and a general feeling of of spontaneity.  The students are, in fact, played by real students, most of whom use their real names.  There’s a “making of” short movie in the special features which looks at how the students prepared for their roles through acting workshops.

As a teacher, I found it fascinating to look into a classroom in another country and see how other schools handle the same kinds of challenges we have here.  The story was very credible, both from the teacher’s point of view and the way the students are portrayed in all their lively, noisy, chaotic glory.