RITELL Conference 2014

RITELL Conference 2014: Strengths, Weaknesses

I attended the RITELL (Rhode Island Teachers of English Language Learners) Conference this year at RIC, and I'm ambivalent about what I found there.

Firstly, it must be said that it was more difficult for me to find anything that might relate to my classroom because it appears as though RITELL is more oriented towards elementary school. The highest grade level that anything was advertised to be for was 6th grade. And I can appreciate this; I'm the first one to say that we need to be targeting ELL's sooner rather than later, and that we need to be looking at kids who are behind in reading levels before it really starts to be problematic. Still, it seems a waste to have an entire ELL conference and not include anything that might relate to middle or high school.

But the real problem I had with this conference was not this; the presenters, to me, were far more problematic. While an excellent speaker, D.H. Figueredo spent as much time explaining the process of writing a book as he did saying anything that an educator could use. His book is very good, and he's a good speaker (and he seems like a pretty nice guy) but it seemed to me like his speech would be very good for informing people on how to get into publishing their own book. And I'm not saying that he should get up in front of us and tell teachers what they should be doing; we can draw our own conclusions from evidence. But there was argument to be made, there was nothing to be gleaned from his speech that might even apply to teaching. Sure, if you're an elementary educator, you can use his book and that's lovely, but you didn't need to listen to him for an hour to figure out that he has a pretty great book.

Still, my frustration with the conference has more to do with the other presentation that I went to. There were 3 going on at the same time; some others in my class and I split up between two of them so that we could explain what happened to each other and gain as much knowledge as possible. From what they told me, it appears that their presentation was essentially along the same lines as the one I attended.

The presentation I went to was called "Engaging ELL's with Culturally Diverse Authors and Themes", which seems good enough to me. There's no problem with the title; I was interested going in. However, the presentation ended up being about an hour of 3 speakers essentially giving book reviews of about 12 books they had in front of them, organized into 3 groups based on ethnicity. On one level, this was useful, because at least I know now that there are, indeed, Cambodian-American texts that I can use in a classroom. My problem is that I could have learned as much from a handout with a list of resources.

I have to trust in these people that these texts do, in fact, engage ELL's, because there wasn't any evidence saying that they would. I'm willing to believe that they will, especially if the books are about their own culture, but this wasn't even brought up. There was no, "So, therefore, use literature that pertains to the culture of your students, because it's out there." Even that would have made me feel better. It was just one book after another, telling the plot of each of them, giving us character synopses...I found it painful, and not all that useful. It is especially troubling that I spent, what, $35 dollars to listen to book reviews?

I was just disappointed. I didn't really gain very much from the experience; I knew going into it that using texts that match the culture of the students can be useful in getting them engaged and excited about reading. It can also give them a world of texts they didn't know existed. If I didn't know this going in, then hey, maybe I'd have learned something.

Microteaching I

Just did my first microteaching! How did I do?

Proving Itself: The Story of Central Falls High School

My View of Central Falls

I walked into Central Falls High School with a lot of misconceptions, a lot of hearsay, and a lot of bias.

Who could blame me? This was a school with an international record of not doing its job right. Nobody fires its entire staff for no reason, right? Right?

Let's consider the record, then. Central Falls is a place that is 1.2 square miles, and houses nearly 20,000 people. It's one of the most densely populated places in the U.S., it recently filed for bankruptcy, and it has a track record of corruption and mismanagement (mostly stemming from the kickback schemes of previous mayor Charles Moreau). More specifically, its school district is heralded to be the worst in the state, with around a 50% graduation rate and consistently low NECAP test scores.

This is the lens through which I saw Central Falls High School: a place of mismanagement, a failed school district, and a crowded place of violence. Let's not forget that only a few years ago, gang violence between Central Falls and Pawtucket gangs escalated to the point that armed policemen with assault rifles formed a ring around the high school. All of this contributed to my view of Central Falls as a crowded, impoverished, violent place.

Changing Course

Whatever it may have been once, it is not now.

I am yet to interact with any students, as our first day working at CFHS was a professional development day, and the students were off for the primary elections. Regardless, what I found in that school was an environment conducive to learning, an environment that welcomed us in. As we stood in the hallway, discussing standard procedure for when we come there, we were greeted by multiple teachers passing by, and one stopped to talk to us about the school, giving his honest opinion about its progress and where it is headed.

He was one of the teachers who was fired from the school, and was later rehired. He told us that it was a difficult time for the school at that point, referencing the gang violence and difficulty in teaching students who did not want to be taught. After asking him multiple questions, he welcomed us to the school and told us where to find him for an honest opinion.

Above all, the person who truly challenged my assumptions about Central Falls High School was its principal. He shared his plan for the future with us, such as certifying all teachers working there in ESL or having to let them go. This is incredibly useful for a community that is nearly 50% Hispanic or Latino. He was clearly very committed to making Central Falls High School a different place than the one we hear about on the news.

The Real Central Falls

I do wonder, however, if the school we heard about just a few years ago was really as bad as the media hyped it up to be. I tend to believe that even if there is violence, poverty, and corruption, the vast majority of people are good people. I imagine that even if we had visited that school a few years ago, we would have still found a welcoming school, filled with students who do care and want to learn.

We also have to remember to keep information in context. The administration of CFHS didn't fire all of its teachers because they weren't doing their jobs, they fired them because there was a disagreement between the unions and the laws at the time for No Child Left Behind. All you heard about on the news, though, was that all of the teachers were fired.

I hope that I can continue to use this experience to question the ideas we have about other places, and the kinds of people we think live there. Even if all we hear about is violence, oppression, and corruption (think Iraq), we have to remember that we are only hearing the worst news. We only have a single story of what these places are like, and as such we have a skewed concept of how they really are.