As we plod into the parking lot at 9:00 p.m., my colleagues conjure the walking dead. Several teachers have the same schedule that I do, a morning class, an evening class and a Saturday class. When we leave on Saturdays, it’s always a wistful, “Enjoy what's left of the weekend.” This week, with the Veteran’s Day holiday we all note, gratefully, that it’s to be a “real weekend.” In the past, I’ve given a little lesson about American veterans, explaining enlistment and highlighting some of the nation’s military accomplishments and the challenges that many veterans face. It’s jettisoned now, like so many other meaningful lessons, as this year we are cramming an already overly ambitious 26-week course into 20 weeks. We are barely half-way through where we need to be and final testing, which is much more rigorous this year, and precludes a lot of teacher discretion in the matter of promotion, is only four weeks away.
I have moaned and groaned about the antiquated course outlines and the downtown ESL advisor is weary of my inquiries. Finally, it is announced that the course outlines are ready and have been given a final tweak by a preeminent ESL author and curriculum designer. There are two Saturday sessions directed at piloting lesson plans based on the new outlines. Although I missed one Saturday course to present a workshop, enormous administrative largesse permits me to miss two additional classes.
It is no surprise that the new course outlines focus on project based cooperative learning. There is an emphasis on digital literacy, which I’d also anticipated. Objectives are split into three contexts: personal advocacy, the workplace, and preparation for post-secondary education. As a Level 1 instructor with a preponderance of undocumented students my choice is to focus much more on personal agency but after attending only one session, and perusing the new course outline I am uncertain as to how much latitude individual teachers will have in tweaking these objectives to meet the needs of a particular class composition.
As I’ve been back in the classroom for only a couple of years, I am relatively open to incorporating new strategies and techniques. One teacher boasts about the verb conjugation charts she has her students copy although there is evidence that grammar is more effectively taught in context. One of the advisors at my school is facilitating a presentation in my classroom, the school’s largest. He has a PowerPoint on a flash drive. I offer to show him how to store it on the cloud so he can access it from any computer, but he brushes me off. This is endemic on my campus. Instructors feel overloaded and practically militant about learning new techniques, even those that will ultimately prove time saving and useful for instruction.
This is the year I am being evaluated and it is a year-long process. Teaching objectives are now called SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely). Rubrics are a big thing and for the purpose of evaluation I am to establish a numerically measurable objective. Students are required to pass a listening test (as well as reading, speaking and writing) in order to ascend to the next level. I hate all of the tests that we use currently but the listening is particularly onerous. it is an hour long and comprised of 38 questions, with the usual confusing design. Much of the test is far too difficult for Level One students and my students groan as it drones on and on. My SMART goal is that my students achieve scores that demonstrate a 25% improvement from pre-test to post-test.
I am working with a colleague, who is also being evaluated, towards creating practice materials for the final listening test. We are provided with an ocean of data including student performance on individual questions. We examine the questions that students have missed and then turn to the post test, ferreting out questions that will be particularly challenging.
My colleague is one of the most experienced and effective instructors in the school, but she is mortified by the computer and doesn’t even have a smart phone. I show her some of the stuff I’m able to do on the suite of software that the district provides and how a PowerPoint can be made in just a couple of minutes. I’m often able to throw one together during a coffee break if there’s something that needs reinforcement. She bites on the PowerPoint possibility and I walk her through creating one. The next night she proudly demonstrates that she has created a PowerPoint all by herself. All of the images are on a single slide, as she’s forgotten how to insert a new one, but she has been able to open the app and insert images. We’ll figure it out though and wean her from thousands of dog-eared flashcards.
I fear that adapting the new course outlines is going to meet enormous resistance, as for many of the teachers who’ve done it a long time, they represent a giant sea change and render most of the stuff they’ve spent decades assembling obsolete. There is a tool kit with suggested lessons and resources that accompanies the course outline, but this will require a lot of fleshing out before it’s a real asset. The old course outlines are twenty years old. A periodic update would have made for a less radical paradigm shift and I hope that we don’t have to rely on the new ones until they are woefully outdated.
It’s library week. We’ve done lessons and tested students (using crappy materials) on the Los Angeles Public Library. Every student on the campus is to receive a library card and ride on the bus for a teacher lead tour of Central Library. When I was a kid, field trips were anticipated eagerly for weeks. At the adult school, and I’m not sure why, only about half of a class will show up for a field trip. I speculate that the purpose isn’t understood, it seems weird or maybe that they’re just too tired. As I write this, it occurs to me that I should find out.
The library cards are delayed for weeks and I only receive them on the night of the field trip. Unfortunately, there are no cards for about a third of my class. I have 54 students enrolled but only 23 show up for the trip. The librarians hand out a tour plan to prevent the influx of students from clogging things up, but I ignore it. We start on the bottom floor of the new building, travel up and end up at the spectacular Rotunda and Children’s section.
After scanty attendance of my night class I predict that only four of my twelve morning ladies will show up the next day for the morning tour but there are nine of them. I sit with Isabel on the bus. She’s eighty-five and has lived in Los Angeles for thirty years. She has never been to the Central Library. She has never been downtown. “I just stay in my neighborhood,” she reports. I ask her if she likes the library, as we stare up at the ceiling of the rotunda. “Que hermoso,” she whispers, like we’re in church. The ladies take a ton of pictures, posing in front of paintings and sculptures and the giant teddy bear in the children’s section.
Marvin, my music lover, stomps over to my desk. His library card doesn’t work. There has been no clarification that the card barcode number (not the school id) and the last four digits of a phone number are required for online access. I get him logged on and show him the amount of music that he can download. Every Wilco album and all of Jeff Tweedy’s solo work pop up. We both like Wilco. Marvin often reminds me of my kids but particularly when he scoffs that the quality of the downloads might not be very good. “Dude, you’re listening on your phone! Pick up some better ear buds.”
Teaching three different classes makes prep time quite minimal and most of the time I stick to the book and the (pretty good) worksheets and digital platforms that accompany it. I am trying to do more grouping of students, collaboration, problem solving and letting them generate their own language. Groups work together on a dictation project and it goes pretty well. I rush to create cards naming the injuries and illnesses we’ve been studying. BACKACHE, SORE THROAT, HEADACHE, COLD, ALLERGY, STOMACHACHE. Then I make cards with pictures of remedies. HEATING PAD, COUGH DROPS, ANTACID, ASPIRIN. Half the room gets the illness cards and half, the pictures of remedies. The assignment is to find someone who has the remedy for your problem (Using “I need” and “I have”) and then switch cards. My first error is to not do this in small groups. I’d just divided the class in half. I show them what to do and then have some advanced students demonstrate but it’s towards the end of the class, they really don’t get it and start drifting out. This is probably the first time that I’ve expressed any sort of consternation. “Class isn’t over!” I state firmly but then I realize that it’s a washout. I block the door and make them tell me what they have on their card and let them go home.
My Saturday class is teaching the ESL portion of hybrid course that’s an introduction to Health Information Technology. I miss the last two Saturdays for workshops, but I’ve spent time with my co-teacher planning out lessons. Plans and links to videos are written on labelled folders and when copies come in, they are placed by my colleague into numbered folders. My co-teacher is in a car accident, but as the lesson is well planned out, I know that I can handle it. I learn the medical material along with the students and help them develop the appropriate language, reading, writing and listening skills to make use of the information. It’s the endocrine system which I vaguely know has to do with glands, but I’ll learn it as I teach it. I arrive when the school opens, 45 minutes before class. The folder is gone. I text my co-teacher who thinks that, for some reason that I cannot begin to fathom, that the folder is in her car. I got nothin'. The other Saturday students are going to the library but as almost all of ours have made the evening field trip, I exempt my class. In that I haven’t a thing to teach and I don’t want to make busy work and have no imagination or time to create something better, I opt us back into the field trip.
A few of them haven’t been before and as I’ve recently conducted two tours and read the (mostly) excellent Susan Orlean The Library Book, I’m confident that I can give an enriched experience and I’m particularly excited to have a group of students who are much more advanced in English. As I’ve only got 8 students, I team up with a friend who teaches first level ESL. The plan is that I’ll direct the tour and my more advanced students will make sure that the others understand and are able to participate and answer questions.
We start in the basement where there is a photo exhibit of Los Angeles during the Space Race. There are astronomers, funny spacesuits, the giant Rocketdyne facility in Canoga Park, JPL labs—a great depiction of the era and the local enthusiasm. Before we enter the exhibit, I ask what the first country was the first to launch a rocket. One of my advanced students knows that it’s Russia and we go on to talk about the post-war U.S./Russia competition. One of the vocational teachers (I’ve seen him but don’t know his name or what he teaches) shows up with his small group and gloms onto us. I continue asking questions. What country sent the first man into space? “Yuri Gagarin!” calls out the vocational teacher. “Who was the first man to step on the moon?” “What year did we land on the moon?” Clueless that I’m actually attempting to teach, the teacher continues to blurt out the answers. I whisper to my partner teacher to tell him to shut the fuck up, but she demurs.
We manage to ditch the vocational class in the New Americans center where the students marvel at the amount of Spanish language materials and grab a lot of pamphlets. There is a display of selections from an autograph collection started by Charles Lummis. I explain that before selfies, people got autographs and that the LAPL has one of the largest collections in the world. The library has made available sheets for patrons to add their own signatures to the collection. All of the students sign, and I have the Korean student write greetings in Korean and the two Ethiopians to write in Amharic. I make sure that all of the students who didn’t get their library cards through school get them. Many of them check out books and DVDs. I read the news and check out Amazon sales on my phone on the bus ride back to school. Most of the students are on their phones too but there are a smattering who are reading books. The Count of Monte Christo (in Spanish). Study Guide for the U.S. Citizenship Test. Arabic Calligraphy. Steinbeck’s The Red Pony (in English).
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