A Grant! A Grant! We got a GRANT!

Back in early November, my school system announced that they had some grant monies available for employees interested in putting together technology proposals for innovative ways to use technology in the classroom. They left the proposals open: anyone with an innovative idea could apply. I could have applied solo or with a group of people or... wide open.

So with the other ESL teacher in my building I applied for a grant that would give my students iPod touch devices or iPads to take home with them at night. We would integrate these into the classrooms, but the innovation here is that we are going to allow our kids to take them home at night to do work. I know this isn't all that innovative at a national level--there are schools where having an iPod touch for each student is the norm. I used to work at a laptop school where every student and teacher had a laptop to use in the classroom. But for our school system, this is something new. We don't generally send home hi-tech devices with our students.

Well, we made it through the first round. The district got 62 proposals, and they narrowed them down to 17. The 17 had to go over to Central Office to present their proposals to a room of about 15 people. That was January 3, and we had been waiting to hear back until Thursday night when we got an email letting us know the results. They selected five proposals to fund, and ours was one of them.

I'm thrilled. I don't know if that's the right word. I'm terrified and thrilled. This is an amazing opportunity to pilot something that our district would like to consider for the future. But it's also an incredible responsibility as I essentially vouched for my students in front of the board when we were defending the proposal. The catch is that there is no way that my students' families could pay to recover the cost of a lost/stolen/broken device, so the risk and liability falls back on my judgment in terms of who gets to take them home and who doesn't.

I also now have a lot of work ahead of me. I'm going to TESOL in March, and I'm really looking forward to soaking up from other professionals how they are using this stuff. Prior to that, there is just going to be a lot of experimentation. I have been searching for apps, but I haven't found anything that I'm REALLY excited about. I definitely want them to have a flashcard app, but I need to find one that includes an image and sound on it.

We'll see where this goes. In discussing the funding with the project manager on Friday, I found out that we may have the devices in our classroom by the middle of February. What an amazing opportunity.

There are days...and yesterday was one of them...

DISCLAIMER: On most days and at most times, I absolutely love my students. They are the hardest working bunch of kids on the planet, and they generally do what I ask them to do without question. They amaze me daily with how they negotiate between the English-speaking world and their world at home while living in a new culture. They are incredible in their motivation and effort. And I would not trade them for another classroom in the district or even the state. But there are days, and yesterday was one of them...

I was out from school on Tuesday because I was facilitating the CLIMBS workshop for other teachers. My classroom aide and the substitute teacher gave my students vocabulary words from science to work with and also some ESL grammar work and also some math work. We had snow days on Wednesday and Thursday. So walking in to my class Friday was like walking in to a graveyard. It sucked the teaching life right out of me.

After any sort of unusual break (snow days, extended vacations, or even just weekends), the students have gotten themselves comfortable speaking only their first language again. And even the simplest question is met with blank stares. "What did you do this weekend?" or "What did you do yesterday?" become sadly painful questions to ask no matter how many times I ask them. I can even tell my students on Friday that I am going to ask them on Monday about their weekend, and they don't come in prepared to talk about it. I can assign them to draw a picture about their weekend or write some words down about their weekend; when I ask them about it, I still get blank stares as they look from their paper to me and back to their paper again as if a stranger put those words or that picture on the paper. It's maddening.

So yesterday, Friday, when I went in to the classroom, and I put some questions on the board to start their morning (as I always do), I got the expected response from many of them. This is not something I understand. Some would say to me, "If you know that is how they are going to respond, why do you keep asking them?" Well, I guess it is because the kids need to know how to make small talk, and talking about what you did when you were not in school is pretty fundamental to that idea? I don't know. Maybe it's because I think if I do it often enough, they'll get it? You tell me. Pedagogically, there are a bunch of reasons to do it. But in terms of impacting my morale, it's an energy suck.

And then there was the homework. I had their math papers on my desk. They were to name some fractions using papers listing the cardinal and ordinal numbers. They had papers with the cardinal and ordinal numbers on them. 4/5= four fifths. This was after practice, intervention, teaching, examples. I was getting this: 2/2= tow tow. And this was from a student who is back for her second year in my class. They had been practicing all last week that when the denominator is 2, it is "half" or "halves". It didn't stick.4/5 = four fiv.

And the ESL homework? I had four kids out of my fourteen who were in school yesterday who didn't even crack their workbooks. Literally. They didn't even open the book to the pages that they were supposed to have done. And they had two extra days to do them. And one of them was that same student who has now been in my class for a year and a half, and she saw the same material last year.

From the QOD, the math homework, and the ESL homework, I was discouraged. So I assigned a lot of homework for the weekend. Retribution. I don't know what else to call it. At the end of the day, as I was going over their list of homework assignments, one student was shooting dirty looks at one of the offending non-homework-doers. I was thinking that was a good thing. Maybe peer pressure will kick her butt into high gear?

On a side note and for my next post, much of my discouragement was oddly fueled by the FANTASTIC news that a fellow teacher and I are the recipients of a grant that will give us iPads and iPods for our students to use in assignments at home at night. Can you even imagine?

CLIMBS. Module 3. Assessment. The elephant in the room.

I deliver/facilitate the CLIMBS workshop for our school district. I have 37 teachers and administrators sitting in a room at Central Office for five days, and I get to use those five days to try to help them to help their ELL students. Today was day 3. And I was dreading it.

I spent hours and hours and hours revising and supplementing the materials, and I think I delivered something today that was useful and useable. And the point I kept stressing to the people in the workshop today was that the things that they are doing with their ESL students are the things that will also help their non-ESL students. That's the thing that I don't think I've gotten them to buy. We got many great comments at the end of the day, but the one that stuck with me was a teacher writing that s/he felt sorry for the native speakers in his/her room.

I have no idea how to feel about that. There's some honesty there. It's easier to teach a class when everyone knows the language. What the impact is on the students is when there isn't linguistic diversity in their classes, I don't know. But I do believe that ALL students will benefit from a teacher who can teach both language and content. And I do believe that ALL students can benefit from working with diverse learners. So I don't know how to feel about the honesty of a teacher who says that s/he feels sorry for the native speakers in his/her room.