A Day in the Life of a Substitute Teacher # 2

Not a bad day today in my substitute teaching.

I was fortunate to be assigned to a class of English as a Second Language students. These are students that I tutored for last year, so I already know almost all of them.
In general, the ESL students are a little less mature and sophisticated in some ways than the regular students, but also less cynical and less disobediant. They come from different cultures, and unlike the predominant cultures of the rest of the students in our school, they respect teachers and elders.

The third period of the day was given over to an asembly devoted to Black history. I was expecting a rather sorry show like last year's, with a certain amount of badly synchronized and totally undisciplined ass shaking, plus a monologue or two that didn't say much. This year, though, was totally different.

First, the show started with a tall Black student reciting Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech. This high school kid had obviously spent a lot of time looking at movies of King making that speech. He had every intonation, every pitch of the voice, and even every hand gesture down pat. It was truly inspiring, just as the original must have been.
Following this, about twenty-five students came dancing down the assembly halls' aisles, doing Brazilian dance to exciting drumming. The drumming came from two African students performing onstage. For once there was discipline, coordination, precision and feeling to the dance. I was reminded of what I have seen dozens of times in Tahiti.

This was followed with something I had never seen before, a sung recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet #23. After that came a series of very short speeches by three or four students asking why they, the people their age in their community, are killing each other. Everyone in the audience knew that last weekend we had had seven murders in our city, which may be a record, and all these had been in the Black community. At the assembly's end, a Black teacher spoke briefly and movingly about what he considers to be the definition of "Black."

Then it was back to the classroom. The foreign students are learning some basic vocabulary, so we talked about a picture of a "community," and what a "community" consists of. They were then required to make a drawing of a mall and the activities going on in it. One of the interesting things I have noticed is that the Chinese students, while very tuned into math and science, have difficulty being creative and imagining things. I was once told by a Chinese student who was instructed to draw an illustration for a story, "I can't do that because it isn't real."

The final two periods of the day were devoted to composition. The students wrote about the assembly they had attended, what they saw, what they liked and what they didn't like. To get 250 words out of them in a composition is a major effort. They have trouble with the definitions of words, and they have a lot of trouble with the grammar. But the only way they will ever learn is to try to do it and to be gently corrected when they make errors.

One other thing happened today that was very important. A few of the students in the class are Hispanic. One of them seems to their regular teacher to be a real troublemaker. He probably is, but he definitely wants to learn. I think we have a situation in which two personalities grate against each other. The student claims that the teacher looks at the name on his work and just gives him a D or an E without even reading it. While I doubt that the situation is as cut and dried as all that, I am sure she gives him bad grades because his English is terrible. I respect her very much and I know that she is extremely competent.

What happened today was that the student came to me and told me about the situation. I told him that there was a way to remedy it, but that it would take some work. I Xeroxed several of his terrible papers, and we are going to meet on Tuesday in the school library after classes, when there is almost always a tutoring session. We will go through one of his papers with a fine tooth comb, identifying every grammar and spelling error. I will explain these to him. He will then rewrite the essay in good English. He will put the Xerox of the old version plus the rewritten version in a manilla folder, write his name on the top right corner of the folder, and write "For Ms. X" (X being the teacher's name) and simply leave it on her desk. There will be no explanation. I think after we do this a few times, he will have improved his written English and she will begin to see him in a better light.

To find a struggling student who is doing poorly and estimated by his teacher's to be a failure and to be able to help him get good grades and a little bit of respectability in his regular teacher's eyes is one of the great joys of teaching.