The English Teacher

Writing has always been hard for me because English was never my best subject. Ever since elementary. I wasn’t a strong reader. I’ve read on a fourth grade level for as long as I can remember. Each school year English got harder, but I never gave up. Academic writing use to be a walk in the park. All it took was a beginning, middle, and end, after that turn it in. Teachers actually cared about students doing their work, and turning it in on time. Teachers would even let students turn in work…

observing a mentor teacher take students through various ELL lessons. The teacher was keen to help the students with limited English language and literacy skills better understand the content of the lessons. One observed that the students lacked the basic literacy skills to comprehend grade-level content. A template was made to gather information regarding teacher practice that was necessary in assessing the implementation of instructional strategies for the subject. The teacher also coordinated…

Not Really English When you first start school, and begin to learn your A, B, C you are taught a certain way. Much like when you get older and begin to learn how grammar works. Or even longer when you learn proper formats and writing styles. Then again back to learning how to read. This time more complicated wrapped around books and articles. Through all these times you are taught a certain way. You are taught things that are necessary at the time. Your kindergarten teacher would not ask you to…

doctors or engineers, teachers bear the responsibility to educate and inspire the next generation. Due to the experiences I had with my teachers, I was inspired to become an ELA teacher in order to promote inclusiveness in the classroom. My purpose here at UTRGV is to become a successful English teacher, and I have set a variety of professional goals in order to accomplish this. My inspiration for pursuing a teaching career stems from the experiences I had with my teachers. Throughout my…

Our society is everchanging and the world in which our children live today is significantly different from previous generations. Our student population is becoming more diverse than ever, and we are seeing many more English as a Second Language (ESL) students and students with diverse cultural backgrounds enter our classroom. Moreover, society is becoming more and more technology driven meaning we communicate and access information via a range of literacy resources including computers, smart…

grow up as an Asian in my community. That is because I sometimes had trouble understanding the culture of others and my own culture at my young age. When I was younger, I found it very challenging to understand many of the things my peers and teachers were saying figuratively. For example, I had difficulty understanding jokes, so I took them literally and did not know they were joking. Most of the time they were laughing and I had no idea why they were laughing. Furthermore, I had…

States were in ELL programs (NCES, 2015). During the same school year, there were over 19,000 English-Language learning students in the state of Hawaii’s school system, a 50% increase from a decade prior (Colorin Colorado 2015). Hawaii, a member of WIDA (World Class Instructional Design And Assessment) along with several others states with large ELL populations, possesses a variety of ways to assess the English language development of ELL students. Despite this, ELL students often fail to…

The past year and a half I have been teaching at KIPP Delta Collegiate High School. During my first year as a teacher, I taught three courses in freshman English and one in English three, attended three professional development meetings per week, and had to construct two sets of lesson plans. To a veteran teacher this is a walk in the park, but it was challenging for a novice teacher who did not major in the area he enjoys teaching. Every day I tried to make sure my students were developing…

Making content accessible is on my top ten list of crucial aspects of being a great teacher. When I think about content that is accessible, my mind goes to tasks that have more than one access point. In many math classrooms across the nation, there are a variety of skills that come with students that need to be taken into consideration when looking at curriculum. I believe that the best mathematical tasks are those that allow a student who is two or three level below grade level and a student at…

Observations were conducted in a Transitional Bilingual Education Kindergarten class at PS 120 and at a Dual Language First grade class at PS 163. Viewing a live classroom provided a novel learning experience from veteran teachers using various methods or strategies of teaching while observing the students’ responses, the classroom environment amalgamated with the interaction of students. On Friday 3/16/18, Ms. Hong’s Kindergarten class had 25 Chinese students concluding an 08:25 morning…