(I walked in a little late thanks to a very minor incident at home: my boy is still in a cast so he needed potty-help which put me back by a few minutes.)
It was a very short and sweet conference. What I found most intriguing was the translation between the parties. This is ELL at work. The student, "Yasmin", was busily having some snack while her mom and Mrs. Dearly had their conference. I have found out a lot of interesting things with an ELL child. It may be typical and it may be true. In one of my classes, it has been founded that ELL children's reading/writing scores are lower than those who are not an ELL student. BUT....their scores in other areas are high. Yasmin's reading/writing scores were a little low; her math is impressively high.
In my spring classes, I remembered that we talked about "gifted" children. During my time 70's-80's -- gifted meant someone who had a high IQ. Now, the term "gifted" is being used loosely. In fact, a gifted child may now belong to a sub-group. My 10 year old daughter would probably fit in many areas: art, writing, reading, (and just recently) math (but we're watching that closely -- math's her weakness).
Having said that, Yasmin could be considered to be gifted in the math area. She's really good and her math scores are very high. Due to her minimum English speaking skills, her reading/writing scores are unsurprisingly low. It's sad but true that this very fact affect many of our kids in Title I schools, hence, the low reading/writing scores.
Due to high immigration everywhere, our nation has been affected with reading and writing. BUT...and I say this with a big BUT...if you were to score children from MY generation -- that's right, ME -- we were very, very, very low in all academic areas. In my Social Order class, we watched a film on "American Public Education" and an interviewer asked a high school kid (from the mid 80's) who was the first man who landed on the moon. This kid answered with a ??? look on his face that said "Someone landed on the moon?" Another kid was asked if she can name at least one president that was assassinated. She didn't get it right. Funny? More like embarassing. I grew up in that era -- that generation. I can attest to so many things that today many professionals say about our failing schools, most especially during that time. It has been founded that we are actually doing a lot better than ever before, but our nation's leaders say it is not enough.
We are going through another cyclical increase in immigration (the first was pre WWII) which means overcrowded classrooms. This results in discipline problems, low classroom parental involvement (for many reasons: two jobs, dual working parents, language barriers, etc.), and inexperienced teachers, just to name a few. Although this has been a controversial issue, over the last two decades or so, immigrants still come to America to gain a better life and/or a better education for their children. Of course, this eats up our economy and we feel that we, Americans, are being taken advantage of, but teachers of today still have to face these realities, accept them and conform to the changes.
As I sat there observing Mrs. Dearly having a conference with Yasmin's mother (via translator), Yasmin's face lit up whenever Mrs. Dearly spoke of how well she does which is way beyond expectations in comparison to her peers. Yasmin, is mathematically "talented". I can see this child succeeding in perhaps, engineering. Forget her reading/writing level. She'll "get it" in time. Like most parents who immigrated from another country, Yasmin's parents are helping to preserve their culture through language. As I have seen with many, many ELL children from my previous job, their parents DO try to speak our nation's language -- American English. Because of the minimal and limited skills they have in English, their children will certainly pick up grammatical and spelling errors. It is inside our classrooms where we -- the teachers -- provide the necessary lessons to help these children succeed in areas such as reading and writing.
I believe -- with time -- Yasmin will soon catch up to her American peers. After I left Mrs. Dearly's classroom, I felt a sense of optimism because Yasmin is very fortunate to have so many people help her succeed academically. She has the resources and most of all, she has a lot of caring people who will give her the chance to become successful on American soil.
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