Chris - TP # 4

Hey folks,

Today I woke up early and headed over to TCC to see what this ESL class was all about. A friend of mine told me about it and said that the teacher is always looking for volunteers to help out. It was from 9-12 and I couldn't imagine what they could possibly do in there for three hours without getting bored. Not to mention, it's Monday through Thursday.

Most of the students were ladies older than me who were born in other countries and working on their English. However, there was one African guy (I didn't get to talk to him so I'm not sure what country) and, although he sat in the back, he made himself heard. I'd say about half of the ladies were Spanish-speaking and the rest were a mix of various African countries (Ethiopia, Sudan) and Middle-Eastern.

The teacher is a young woman named Kristina Pereira, who teaches at TCC and is involved with PACE. It was immediately clear that she spoke Spanish because she would sneak in some quick explanations to the Hispanic students. I'm not sure if this is a good idea because they should be learning to understand explanations in English, and that kind of alienates half the class. She told me that it was only her second week with that group of students though, so she was still feeling everyone's skill levels out. She was very happy to have me there to help.

When I first got there, some higher-up people at TCC came in and asked us to help them shoot a promotional video for the conference center. It was funny because most of the ESL students that volunteered weren't exactly sure what they were signing up for. We just sat around a conference table while they filmed for a minute. The TCC ladies asked me to communicate the point of the video to everyone, which I thought was silly, since I just repeated what they said in English. Then the ladies kind of laughed when I didn't translate into Spanish. I decided not to waste the effort in telling them that Spanish isn't spoken in Ethiopia or Slovakia...

Then it was back to the classroom. There was a reading about the occupations of a couple different people and the educations they received to get those jobs. I circulated while the students worked on those, offering assistance wherever I could. I saw that this was truly a mixed level class and Kristina dealt with it in this case by telling the more advanced students to write in complete sentences.

Halfway through the class, Ms. Pereira told me that the administrators at TCC sent her an email about me being there. Basically, they said they'd rather me not be there because the liabilities they'd have to deal with if I somehow died in the classroom would be too much to bear. We both laughed this off and filled out the necessary paperwork.

Then we moved on to contractions. There were two worksheets, with fill-in-the-blank problems using contractions. This was just a warm-up for contraction bingo. The bingo sheets had contractions written in each square and Kristina would read a sentence with one contraction in it. This was a great listening activity. There were a lot of false bingos, but that's OK. It was hard to help the students with this one without giving away the answer. All of the students really liked playing the game; it was a great way to end the lesson.

I really enjoyed spending time in this class. While it was more like a class observation at times, I got numerous opportunities to go around and work with individuals. The students thanked me for coming at the end. I'll go back next Monday and probably every Monday and Wednesday until the end of the semester.