A bit of a swap

Today when we showed up to tutor W, there was another ELL student sitting with him who expressed she needed our help. Her tutor hadn’t showed up that afternoon, and since there are two of us that tutor W, he suggested that he shares one of us with her. As future educators we must recognize that not all things go as planned, so it is important to be flexible. We quickly adjusted to the situation, and since W had history homework that my placement partner was genuinely excited about helping him with, I helped the other student. She was good friends with W, and it was really interesting getting to know her in the first five minutes of talking. She and I immediately realized that we have some of the same favorite singers. She and I worked on her essay in which she needed to use multiple online resources to argue her viewpoint on the Dream Act. Her assignment was to analyze each of the sources she used by identifying the perspective or viewpoint of the article and use it to determine if they are biased or not. She had a hard time understanding what biased means and what this concept of a viewpoint was. I then used our previous conversation about our favorite singers to identify that people have various opinions about every subject. Through this example which she found relevant to her, she was able to grasp this concept a little easier. I thought it was rather interesting working with a different ELL student for a day to see similarities and differences between them and my ELL student. I found that she was stronger with speaking in English then W, and that W is stronger with writing in English than she is.

The most fascinating part of our placement today was witnessing when she and W spoke in another language to each other. I assumed they were speaking in one of their first languages, but they were actually speaking in each of their second languages, which are very similar to one another but are different dialects. It was interesting to watch them have conversations in these languages and laugh about the differences in words when they went to teach us a word in various languages at the end of our session. Overall it was a great learning experience to not only watch such a fascinating interaction, but also to remind us to be flexible and adapt to various situations that may occur in the classroom.