Yesterday I went obsering another class at Venice High Adult school. The past couple times I have been observing the literacy class. It was a great experience. The teacher was very helpful in terms of explaining her rationale and methodology to me. I had never thought that being able to read and write can be such a privilege. The students there were not only learning to speak, read, and write English, but also learning to read and write for the first time in their lives. (Well, some of them might have couple years of schooling, but that was it). Not being able to form familiarity of a sound-symble matching does put a person in disadvantage in learning a new language. In their cases, every step of learning has to be pre-processed into micro steps. The worst thing is that, I totally couldn't communicate with them in English, because they were so limited in their English abilities. (That explained why they were there :P)
For example, last time when I was there, students were learning to recognize numbers from 1 to 100. One woman from Egypt was practicing writing numbers. The teacher already warned me to check on her writing because she tends to bring her Arabic writing habit (right to left) into English writing. I didn't think she had much schooling in Egytian Arabic either, judging from the way she held a pen and that she couldn't keep letters in a line. When I walked by, she was copying the two digit numbers ok, except from right to left. For example, she wrote number 35 with "5" first, and then "3". I tried to tell her that she should write "3" and then "5", but she couldn't understand me. She erased "35", and then wrote "33", right to the left. So I wrote on the board to show her. Man, for the first time in my life, I was stranded there with my student, without knowing what to do. After couple miscarried attempt to communicate, she suddenly yelled a cry, and then said "left, right". "Yes, left, and right!" I used my hands to show the directions, and then write the number for her. She got it. And there was much rejoicing.
Anyways, that was what happened last week. After couple times of observation, I felt the lethargy of going there again. I couldn't tell why. This weeked I decided to talk to the principle that I would like to see other levels. She grabbed a teacher who just steped into the office, and then I followed her to the class.
We got there waiting for students to arrive. The first student arriving was a well-dressed Turkish woman. She glided through the classroom and found herself a seat with a complaint, "it's sooo hot today." Diana (the teacher) greeted her with a quick hug, and then they started chatting. At the same time another student from Mexico arrived. Diana introduced me to her students, and then she threw the question at me, "where are you from, Wen-Hsin?" I told them I was from Taiwan. Then she asked them if they knew where Taiwan was. The Turkish woman thought it's Thailand. So Diana gathered all of us to the world map, we all exploited our geographical knowledge for a while. Then more and more students came, the class began. Some students were friends with one another. I spotted two students making faces at each other, having side talks when Diana was talking, like teenage girls, except that they were probably in their 30s or 40s. I also noticed that there were couple students who were more out-spoken than others, which made the class more lively.
That night they were learning pronoun subject (he/she/they/I) and pronoun objects (him/her/them/me). This is my blog, not my teaching journal, so I'm not gonna report how they did it in class. But I really like this class and the teacher's teaching style. As I looked back on my teaching in the past couple months, I realized that I was kinda tense. Maybe that's because I was a rookie, and I felt like one too. This quarter I felt a bit relaxed, so I started making more jokes. I don't know if that's the right way of teaching, but at least I don't want to intimidate my students.
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