journal: March 2004 Archives

My unit on Study Skills was finished -- I was excited about the changes that were to take place in the study habits of students, and I had even created an outline in Spanish, called "Tecnicas de Estudios", that they all copied into their notebook.

It was time for the quiz.

I handed out the half sheets of paper, 5 questions each. Then, an explosion of raised hands and cries of "Teacher!" "Mister!" In one of my groups, I think almost every student asked a question about nearly ever problem. What I had planned to be a 20 minute open-notebook quiz turned into a war of comprehension that spilled over into lunch for most students and into an afternoon period for others.

Grading and discussing them was not much better, and I am grateful now that we are past that unit and into the Alphabet -- something concrete, familiar, and musical.

This week we have continued our review on ordinal and cardinal numbers and the English Alphabet. I have about 7 new students in my second and third year classes. The gap between what they know and the students who have been coming to Instituto El Rey since seventh grade is huge. It is not a gap in learning ability, but merely in achievement. The old students had studied the English Alphabet and numbers the previous years, had been taught by native English speakers, and remembered a significant amount of the material. The new students were completely learning from scratch and had a long way to go to keep on pace with the others.

This has been a week of learning, grieving, and growing. Last Friday the second and third year classes began their unit on Classroom Commands. Thus unit has been very fun because it involves a lot of listening (as learning another language usually does) and responding. We have been learning common classroom commands like “stand up,” “raise your hand,” “look up a word,” “circle the answer,” etc. Overall the classes have been great and really enjoyed the involvement. I have been assigning more homework to make up for their general lack of studying, and some don’t realize how much not doing their homework is affecting their grade.