how many languages do I have to speak to you??? prmt 3- goldenburg

"How many languages do I have to speak...?" WOAH! hold the phone! I went to Glory on the same day of the week like I normally do, only that day was one of the worst days I had ever experienced in my voluntering at the school. Let me first take a couple steps back and explain Mr. Yeller and what I do with the class now. Im not entirely sure what the circumstances were but Mr. Yeller is in fact used to teaching in a High School setting, not middle school. At hearing this my first thought was "why on earth would you lower the grade you want to teach?" with that aside teaching 6th graders is diffrent than teaching 12th graders or 1st graders. Each grade level requires a certain amount of paitentes and some require more than others. My role in the class is not a tudor like my fellow classmates have talked about with their classes. I am more of the teacher helper, whatever he askes me to do, if he askes me to get paper...I get paper, if he askes me to grade student work....I grade the work and so on and so forth.

On one occasion my teacher was off to a really BAD day. The first class of the has only one white boy, but there is also one middle eastern girl. Telling the first period class to do things sometimes is like pulling teeth. My. Yeller asked joe to sit it in his seat after telling 2 other students to do the same he yelled "HOW MANY LANGUAGES DO I HAVE TO SPEAK FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND". I was shocked and did not know what to do. In Claude Goldenburgs article "Teaching English Lanuage Learners" he talkes about how teaching children in their native language should be incorperated into the schooling. Remeber though theses kids are in 6th grade. Goldenburg claims that the population of ELL's (english language learners) have jumped from "2 million to 5 million since 1990"(p 10). There is obviously a very large population of students in the school system who have english as their second language. Mr. Yellers statment hit me like a bus, because I have seen the students talking to each other in the halls in Spanish. Goldenburg also explains that "since spanish speakers tend to come from lower economic and educational backgrounds than either the general population or other immigrants and language minority populations"(p10).

I kind of just sat there watching Mr. Yeller yell thinking to myself how could a professional be so ignorant to the fact that for over 95% of his first class speaks another language over english. When Goldenburg mentions that spanish speakers come from lower educational backgrounds, a little girl Lilly came to mind. Lilly is the middle eastern girl who was mentioned before. I absolutley hate to admit it however since the class is composed of mostly spanish or hispanic children but Goldenburg was absolutely correct when he said other ethnic minorites have more possitive educational backgrounds. Lilly has to be one of the brightest kids in the 1st period class. I must say that almost all of these kids are fluent in both languages, so their elementary schools must have done well with incorperating their langugage with that of english.

I felt as though it was an insult to the childrens ethnic background for Mr. Yeller to make a comment like that. These kids are all bright children who if they stay in school can achieve great things. The populaion of ELL keeps growing more and more, and it is very evident in the Mr. Yellers 1st period History class.

dont judge a book by what your boss said....promt 1

Hey all it's me again!!





So my school is not anything that I had expected. Driving to the school for 8:20 in the a.m is not the greatest thing in the world but apparently the people in the neighborhood surrounding "Glory" (names have been changed for security purposes) comes alive in the early hours. When people think of Providence schools the first things that come to their minds are in fact the neighborhoods. Upon telling some of my co-workers and bosses about the name and location of Glory the first response I received was, "ha ha hah good luck make sure you know the police number by heart". Honestly that's not something I would say to anyone right off the bat, but we will just say that the people I work with are......not all there at times. So Wednesday morning came and luckily for me Glory is seriously like a five minute drive from my house on the east side of Providence.





I take a turn at the Starbucks...yes Starbucks I said it, it was shocking considering what my previous impression of what the neighborhood would be. Start driving down a very wide street with ajour jewelers to my right along with some small coffee shop and to my left are beautiful homes. To get to the school I had to pass 4 stop signs, and while I stoped I could not help but notice the cars parked on the side of the road. Now obviously I'm a college student and pay for it myself and my car is old, theses cars were all new Lexus, Mercedes and I even saw a lime green Cadillac SUV.





On both sides of the road I saw men and women doing their morning jogs, mothers walking their children in strollers, and dog walkers, yes plural many dogs many walkers. I felt like I had stepped into some corny movie like pleasentvill, where it seemed to be almost perfect to live there. I came to the end of the road and took a left to notice a enormous Field of some sort on my right, the construction was absolutely beautiful, and to my right was Glory middle school. The outside of the building was better than many of the buildings on campus at RIC. I parked my car, walked up the walkway, and came to a massive set of doors, then pushed the call button. There was no person saying "can I help you?" just a click to unlock the door. I found my way into the main office, where I then preceded to tell a Secretary (who looked miserable) I was with V.I.P.S for Mr. Yeller. I was then told to take a seat while they called to the room of my teacher.



Upon meeting Mr. Yeller, he briefly told me about the class while we walked the halls of the school. My eyes began to wonder at all of the interesting sites I had not expected to see. The doors to the rooms for storage and such were all made of wood, the tiles on the floor just flowed and the cream colored paint brightened up the halls. One end of the corridor had a plasma touch screen TV, touchscreen!!!! I could not believe how advanced just the hallway was compared to what I had in middle school.



We had finally reached the classroom where the students all had to line up outside of the door and wait to be told to go in. The class room itself had new desk, chairs, smart boards, and computers but was rather very small. the desk were shaped in two horseshoes with the inner one the shorter amount of desk. The classroom itself seems to value respect and listening co operations. Mr. Yeller is always telling the kids to do things because he believes that is how 6th graders should be. They should all sit in their seats, not shout out answers, be respectful to peers and him.

The students are great....somedays. They all have their days just like adults do when they don't want to learn about history at 8:30 in the morning. They really truly are all good children with some bad habits, and after the first day I could see who was the troublemakers and who was not. It was easy to tell who excelled in the class and who just simply don't care. Even though they have bad days they are still wonderfully kids who will someday contribute great things for our nation, states and towns.

introduction to the mind of a crazy chick?

hey all!

so I am setting up this blog for my fned class at RIC. I am a sophmore this semester, and will be moving on out of this place in two more years....thank god! anywho so blogging on my exsperiences at my no-where school and relating it to theorist is what I do. Since taking this class I have actually switched my major and no longer persuing a career in education. We shall see how the rest of the semester goes for me!

good luck to all!

~krystal xox