Week 5 Cramming it in

It occurred to me about halfway through Monday's class that my lesson was asking too much of my students. I was requiring them to pedal over a mountain pass while riding a one-speed, fully-loaded tricycle.

As usual my mistake was my overly ambitious self. One of my many goals for the semester was to have each student keep a journal. Even Level O English students needed to practice writing, and at the end of the class they would have their very own "book" to show the progress they'd made. I had written questions on the board like "What color are your eyes?" "Are you married or single?" And while these questions seemed straightforward to me especially since we had used the blue/brown eyes and brown/black hair vocabulary the week before, confusion was reigning in the classroom.

As I walked around the room I felt tension. When I looked at what they were writing, I understood why. "Are you mar" and "What color are you" had been written in many blue books. I looked at my board from the back of the room, immediately seeing what they saw. The green chalkboard was really two boards screwed in side by side. The metal frames of the boards cut right down the middle. My written questions leaped over the metal divider without hesitation. But for the students the metal barrier was a dead-end. "Married" had been hacked off at the end and "your eyes" was sliced up to create a much more personal question.

Besides the confusing configuration of the board, they needed more guidance to answer the questions. For many students, if I had verbally asked the color of their eyes and hair, they could answer. But the written word involved much more than just knowing the vocabulary. Important words like You, I, Is, and Do are spelled in such a way that many English learners can't recognize them by sounding out the phonetics. I quickly moved to the board and wrote, "My eyes are ________." "My hair is ________." And I instantly heard sighs of relief as they recognized the task at hand. Pencils and pens once again began moving.

After that lesson I vowed to slow the pace and put less "stuff" into my lessons. The last thing I wanted was to discourage these courageous people. I suddenly remembered how I'd felt the previous Monday night when my Spanish teacher's non-teacher husband had subbed for her. My anxiety and frustration when he began speaking in Spanish directly at me, non-stop, nodding his head expecting me to follow the rapid fire of his foreign tongue stayed with me all the way home. I kept wondering if I would ever understand one single word of a language that shared the same alphabet as mine. Learning Chinese or Arabic would be out of the question for me.